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.
There’s a lot we know about the next era of NFL Sunday Ticket, and more details that will emerge as we get closer to the 2023-24 season.
How to get NFL Sunday Ticket
Again, to spell it out, you’ll have two options to which you can subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket.
- NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV: This is the full smash. You get around 100 linear channels, plus unlimited recording, and your local broadcast channels. Plus you’ll get NFL Sunday Ticket.
- NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube: You’ll subscribe via YouTube proper. (This might also be referred to as YouTube Primetime Channels.) No extra linear channels. No broadcast channels. Just YouTube. And NFL Sunday Ticket.
NFL RedZone — basically a channel of live scoring attempts as they’re happening — will still be available on the YouTube and YouTube TV options, but for separate fees.
How much will NFL Sunday Ticket cost?
The short version is that we don’t yet know how much NFL Sunday Ticket will cost on YouTube or YouTube TV. It very much appears as though there may be at least two options, with differences depending on whether you’re subscribed through YouTube or
The YouTube option currently only mentions “every out-of-market Sunday afternoon game” and “no satellite dish needed.” The YouTube TV option mentions “every Sunday game.” That sounds like you’ll be getting something with the
But the line we’re really interested in is “Save on NFL Sunday Ticket with a YouTube TV membership.” That sounds like you’ll get some sort of discount — and in fact, one promo line says “
That still doesn’t answer the question of what the NFL Sunday Ticket price will be. But we can reasonably predict that it won’t be inexpensive. That’s by design, to keep the broadcast networks happy. For context, DirecTV had options that cost about $300 or $400, split monthly. The more expensive option included NFL RedZone and DirecTV Fantasy Zone.
When will NFL Sunday Ticket be available?
You should be able to sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket sometime this spring. Obviously, the season doesn’t start until the fall.
The first 2023 regular-season game is scheduled for September 7. That’s a Thursday night.
NFL Sunday Ticket is, of course, a Sunday thing. So its first games will be on September 10.
Will there be blackouts?
According to the current YouTube TV terms and conditions, blackouts are still possible if the home game doesn’t sell out. (As in sell out all of its tickets.) In that case, the game would be unavailable in that region.
YouTube TV uses your billing address ZIP code to determine this — but it’s also possible that it’ll use your phone’s location data if you’re away from home but still within a blackout zone. “If there is an outage in your location,” the T&Cs say, “we’ll do our best to let you know.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same, apparently.
Will there be team packages?
There’s been a good bit of scuttlebutt about whether NFL Sunday Ticket will be available in any other forms, now that it’s making the leap to a more progressive digital platform.
The short answer is that we still don’t know. Supposedly you’ll be able to start signing up for the new NFL Sunday Ticket sometime this spring. But also supposedly not everything is locked in just yet. On an episode of The Marchand & Ourand Sports Media Podcast, NFL chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp said that some of the details are still in the works and that other options may be possible.
“I don’t know that we’ll go team by team,” Rolapp said. “But could you get fewer games at a lesser price? I think that’s all up for debate and conversation.”
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