NFL Sunday Ticket may get typical YouTube community features

By Phil Nickinson February 6, 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.

Related Videos

NFL on YouTube TV.

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.

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.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Audio / Video

YouTube TV rolls out multiview: watch up to 4 NCAA games at once

An example of YouTube TV's multiview feature.

If you love college basketball and can process more than one game at a time, you're going to go bananas for YouTube TV's new multiview feature, which will be rolling out on a limited, early access basis starting March 14. With multiview, you'll be able to pick up to four channels and see them all simultaneously, with the ability to easily flip the active audio from one to another. The new feature is compatible with any TV-based YouTube TV installations (streaming media players, smart TVs, and game consoles), but it doesn't yet work on mobile devices or computers.

Initially, multiview will only be available to select YouTube TV users, who will be chosen at random. But Google says the goal is to include every subscriber by the time NFL football season starts in the fall. Another limitation, at least for now, is that YouTube TV will preselect the multiview channels you can choose. At launch, only channels that carry NCAA tournament games will be included in that preselected list.
How to use YouTube TV multiview
If you're one of the lucky, randomly chosen users, you'll see an option to watch up to four preselected, different streams at once in your “Top Picks for You” section. After selecting multiview, you can switch audio and captions between streams, and jump in and out of a full-screen view of a game.
It's all about sports
At the moment, YouTube TV sees multiview as an enhancement of the sports viewing experience, so only sports content will be eligible. YouTube TV has had some big sports wins in 2022, including 4K coverage of the Soccer World Cup, and that trend will continue in 2023 thanks to its acquisition of the NFL Sunday Ticket games. However, YouTube TV recently lost access to MLB Network and the MLB.tv add-on, which reduces the amount of sports content available for multiview in 2023.

Audio / Video

NFL Sunday Ticket: how to watch on YouTube and YouTube TV

NFL Sunday Ticket info for YouTube TV as seen on a phone.

Now that Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs have been crowned the winners of Super Bowl LVII and closed out the 2022-23 season, it's time to turn our attention to next season. Because there are going to be some massive changes. First, there's no more Tom Brady. And second is that NFL Sunday Ticket will no longer be on DirecTV and is making the leap to YouTube and YouTube TV.

That's a big deal for a couple of reasons. It'll make NFL Sunday Ticket — which lets you watch pretty much any NFL game you want every week — available to far more people because it no longer will be shackled to satellite TV. Dish TV has slowly been losing subscribers and was down to 7.6 million as of October 2022. Meanwhile, YouTube TV last reported more than 5 million subscribers in mid-2022. (The company doesn't regularly give updates on subscription totals.) And then there's YouTube proper, whose availability and popularity are hard to quantify in the same terms as traditional television numbers because it's just there.

Giveaways

Celebrate our 1,000,000 YouTube subscriber milestone with us and win!

YouTube Subscriber Giveaway

Digital Trends 1,000,000 YouTube Subscriber Giveaway!

We did it! On November 27, 2022, the Digital Trends YouTube channel reached a major milestone: 1 million subscribers! We’ve been counting down for weeks, and now that the moment has finally arrived, we’re ready to celebrate with those who helped us get here (you!) by giving away more than $4,500 in prizes!