Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jon Taffer invented the concept of NFL Sunday Ticket during his three-year term on the board of NFL Enterprises. The service officially launched on the 4th of September 1994, carrying all regional Sunday afternoon games produced by Fox and CBS.
DirecTV paid the league $1.5 billion per year for eight years to maintain exclusivity over the package. This deal became a condition of AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV in 2015.
The league announced on the 22nd of December 2022 that NFL Sunday Ticket would move exclusively to YouTube TV and its Primetime Channels service for residential customers. This shift ended nearly three decades of partnership between the NFL and DirecTV.
Sunday afternoon games scheduled on local Fox and CBS affiliates within a viewer's designated media market were blacked out on the NFL Sunday Ticket feed until 2014. If a game was not sold out in the home market, it remained unavailable on the subscription package based on the ZIP Code of the viewer's address.
A Los Angeles jury found the NFL violated antitrust law in October 2024 and ordered penalties totaling over $4.7 billion. Judge Philip Gutierrez overturned this verdict on August 1, ruling that expert testimony used flawed methodologies.