NFL Sunday Ticket may get typical YouTube community features

By Phil Nickinson Published February 13, 2023

The 2022-23 NFL season is about to wrap up with the Super Bowl, and there are many months until the next installment. That also means there’s quite some time before we see NFL Sunday Ticket make the leap to Google-owned YouTube and YouTube TV.

But we’re already starting to glean a few more details as to the future of NFL Sunday Ticket, which until this year has lived solely on DirecTV.

NFL on YouTube TV. — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The switch won’t necessarily come without its own complexities. You’ll be able to get NFL Sunday Ticket on the YouTube TV streaming service — which currently has more than 5 million subscribers. Or you’ll be able to get it on YouTube Primetime Channels, which is a way to get premium content via YouTube proper. You’ll also still be able to subscribe to NFL RedZone (basically a live channel of scoring highlights as they happen) separately via YouTube TV.

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We don’t yet know what NFL Sunday Ticket will cost under this new scheme. It’s always been sold at a premium price — that was mandated by the broadcast networks that show in-market games — and that almost certainly will continue in 2023.

Official details about both subscription methods also are pretty slim, but it’s starting to look like there might be some features on YouTube Primetime Channels that may not be on YouTube TV. In response to a questionon the fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call for YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet (which basically also means Google), Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer for Google, alluded to some standard YouTube features alongside the NFL game itself.

“We will be adding new features specific to the Sunday Ticket experience,” Schindler said, “like comments, chats, polls, and so on.”

That sounds pretty much exactly like what’s in the current Community tab for a typical YouTube channel. So it could well just port over to NFL Sunday Ticket, or could just be an exec talking up current features — or we could end up seeing something more tailored to the NFL Sunday Ticket experience.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Former Section Editor, Audio/Video

Phil spent the 2000s making newspapers with the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, the 2010s with Android Central and then the…

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