One of the most exciting things about the 2023 NFL season is that NFL Sunday Ticket is going to be available to a lot more people — basically, everyone, since it’ll be streaming on YouTube TV and YouTube proper. This raises a good question: Does DirecTV have anything left for football fans?
Today, the NFL answered that question: NFL Network and NFL RedZone will be available on the legacy satellite service, on the DirecTV Stream streaming service, and on the old U-verse DSL service, keeping the dream alive after two decades. NFL RedZone is a channel that shows scoring opportunities as they’re about to happen, hoping from game to game in the process. And NFL Network has the occasional game and plenty of news and features beyond that.
And that’s good news if you’re actually still a customer of any one of those services. But while we don’t actually know how many subscribers are still on satellite or U-verse DSL since AT&T spun them off into their current iterations as part of the DirecTV family, those numbers weren’t exactly growing when the change happened in 2021. Look at it like this — the total number of “premium TV connections” was down to just under 16 million at the end of March 2021. The service known as AT&T TV had fallen to about 656,000 about a year before that. That’s not nothing. But by comparison, YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers at last count.
And while the DirecTV numbers are murky at best — since they’re not publicly reported anymore — and almost certainly not as big as you think, the ability to watch something on a service you might happen to still have is definitely a good thing.
“With this agreement, DirecTV continues a long-standing partnership with the NFL and maintains our sports leadership position by delivering the best of sports content to our customers,” Rob Thun, chief content officer of DirecTV, said in a press release. “This deal strengthens our NFL relationship as it includes expanded carriage of NFL Network and all the best action from Sunday’s games with NFL RedZone, which is now available to customers across all three DIRECTV platforms.”
And then there’s the nostalgia factor, we suppose. Sure, you can stream games on newfangled services like Amazon Prime Video and, starting this fall, on the same YouTube that hosts your favorite cat video. And you can still get a taste of the NFL on your satellite dish.
“DirecTV was an initial launch partner of NFL Network over 20 years ago and we’re thrilled to continue our long-standing partnership which caters to millions of DirecTV customers who are NFL fans,” Hans Schroeder, Executive Vice President of Media Distribution for the NFL, said in the same press release. “This renewal will provide fans across all DirecTV platforms the ability to watch NFL Network’s award-winning coverage of America’s most popular sport while also giving greater access to the wildly popular NFL RedZone.”
But that’s merely hanging onto the past. The NFL — and many of its fans — already have moved on elsewhere.
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