NFL Sunday Ticket

• 1. Introduction

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  NFL Sunday Ticket launched on the 4th of September 1994, with a simple promise: if your team was not playing in your city that weekend, you could still watch them. Before that day, geography was destiny for football fans. You lived in one market, you watched that market's games. Everyone else played out of sight.

  The idea had a specific origin. Entrepreneur Jon Taffer, who would later become a television personality, largely invented the concept during his three-year term on the board of NFL Enterprises. He worked alongside NFL Chief of Marketing Michael Miller. Together they built the package that would reshape how millions of people follow the sport.

  For nearly three decades, one company controlled the entire product in the United States: DirecTV. That era ended with the 2022 season, when the NFL moved the package to YouTube TV. And in between, the package sparked a class-action lawsuit from more than 2.4 million subscribers who said they were overcharged. The damages sought reached $7.1 billion.

  This is the story of a television package that turned out to be far more complicated than just watching football on a Sunday.

• 2. How the Package Works

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  The package carries all the regional Sunday afternoon games produced by Fox and CBS, the ones unavailable on local affiliates in a viewer's home market. The primary audience is fans who live outside their team's home region, and sports bars that want to draw customers who root for out-of-market teams.

  One technical feature shapes the entire viewing experience: blackouts. Sunday afternoon games airing on local Fox and CBS affiliates are blacked out on the NFL Sunday Ticket feed for viewers in that game's designated media market, which is determined by the ZIP code of the viewer's address. Viewers must watch those games on their local broadcast stations instead. Until the end of the 2014 season, a separate blackout rule also applied to games not sold out at the stadium. The NFL suspended that local blackout policy for the 2015 regular season and has since done so indefinitely.

  The pricing structure has its own logic. NFL Sunday Ticket viewers do not count toward local Nielsen ratings. Offering the package on cable cost CBS and Fox affiliates millions of dollars in lost revenue from local commercial breaks, as opposed to the national ads sold by the networks. To compensate, CBS and Fox wrote rules into their broadcasting contracts requiring that NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers be charged premium prices.

  That tension between national distribution and local broadcast rights would shape every major decision the NFL made about the package for decades.

• 3. The DirecTV Era

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  DirecTV did not launch NFL Sunday Ticket from the beginning. The service initially aired on C band satellites, which require larger receiving dishes. DirecTV joined partway through the 1994 season, airing the package in the final five weeks of the regular season. The following year it took over in full.

  The arrangement deepened over time. DirecTV agreed to extend its contract past 2014 by paying the NFL $1.5 billion per year for eight years. Securing that deal also became a condition of AT&T's 2015 acquisition of DirecTV.

  Over the years DirecTV added features beyond the basic package. From 2005 to 2009, an add-on called Superfan cost an extra $100 and bundled several extras. Beginning in 2012, those features migrated to the NFL Sunday Ticket Max package, also priced at $100 extra. One of those features was a channel that showed eight games simultaneously, with each feed displaying the score, the time remaining, and the quarter. Another was the Red Zone Channel, launched in 2005 and hosted by Andrew Siciliano, which offered commercial-free coverage jumping between all games in progress on Sunday afternoons. From 2009 to 2019, all games in the package were available in high definition.

  The reach of the service extended beyond the home. Between the 26th of September 2010 and the 29th of December 2019, DirecTV offered the full slate of Sunday Ticket games on JetBlue flights to 50 destinations across the United States. Starting in 2009, a streaming option called NFL Sunday Ticket To Go became available to non-DirecTV subscribers who could not receive satellite television due to line-of-sight issues, at a price $50 higher than the rate for DirecTV customers.

• 4. The Move to YouTube

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  By the 2021 season, DirecTV and its majority owner AT&T were publicly questioning the value of the package. The company had fewer than half the subscribers it needed to break even on Sunday Ticket. The NFL, meanwhile, was adding games outside the traditional Sunday afternoon windows.

  On opening weekend of the 2021 season, CNBC reported that the league was interested in partnering with a streaming service for future rights. In July 2022, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC that a streaming service would be selected to host Sunday Ticket, with the winning service to be announced that fall. Amazon, Apple Inc., and ESPN were all candidates. That same month, The New York Times reported that YouTube had submitted a bid. By October, CNBC reported that Apple wanted flexible and unrestricted global streaming rights, something the NFL could not offer because of its existing exclusivity agreements with CBS and Fox for local games.

  On the 22nd of December 2022, the league announced that NFL Sunday Ticket would move exclusively to YouTube TV and YouTube's Primetime Channels service for residential customers beginning with the 2023 season. NFL RedZone on YouTube replaced the DirecTV Red Zone Channel; the original DirecTV version and the NFL Network-produced NFL RedZone, which had launched four years after the DirecTV channel in 2009 and was hosted by Scott Hanson, had coexisted for years before the 2023 changeover.

  For commercial venues such as bars and restaurants, the NFL announced on the 28th of March 2023 that it had partnered with RedBird Capital to form a new company called EverPass Media. EverPass reached its first agreement with DirecTV on the 25th of May 2023 to sell Sunday Ticket to DirecTV's business customers, allowing venues to keep showing games without switching to a streaming-only system.

• 5. The Antitrust Case

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  In 2015, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers. The plaintiffs alleged that the NFL, its member teams, its broadcast partners, and DirecTV conspired to violate antitrust law by granting DirecTV exclusive rights to the product, restricting competition and forcing viewers to pay artificially elevated prices.

  By the time arguments began in federal court in June 2024, the class had grown to more than 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 commercial subscribers who had paid for NFL Sunday Ticket between 2011 and 2023. The lawsuit sought $7.1 billion in damages, with potential treble damages reaching $21 billion.

  On the 27th of June 2024, a jury in Los Angeles found that the NFL had violated antitrust law in setting the price of the package and ordered a penalty of more than $4.7 billion. With triple damages permitted under federal antitrust law, the league faced potential liability of $14.39 billion. The NFL said it would ask the presiding judge to set aside the verdict.

  On the 1st of August 2024, Judge Philip Gutierrez overturned the jury verdict. He ruled that two expert witnesses had used flawed methodologies in their analysis. Without that testimony, the judge concluded, no reasonable jury could have found class-wide injury or damages. The NFL had survived the largest sports antitrust verdict in the case's history, though the underlying question of whether the exclusive arrangement harmed consumers remained an open one.

• 6. International Reach

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  In 1998, NFL Sunday Ticket became available to cable systems in Canada, with Rogers Cable in Ontario among the first providers to carry the service. The exclusivity of the package to cable operators drew a complaint from ExpressVu, now known as Bell Satellite TV, which asked the CRTC to force the NFL to open the service to Canadian satellite providers. The CRTC dismissed the complaint.

  In July 2017, the streaming service DAZN acquired Canadian rights to the NFL's out-of-market package, beginning with the 2017 NFL season. After DAZN's Canadian launch drew frequent technical complaints and user criticism, DAZN began offering the package to television providers as an alternative to its over-the-top product.

  The package also reaches Mexico and Central America through Sky México, South America and the Caribbean through Vrio, and several cable providers in The Bahamas and Bermuda. In most international markets, alternate services such as NFL Game Pass International have since replaced NFL Sunday Ticket, though the service continues in limited circumstances in some regions.

  EverPass Media, the commercial distribution company formed in 2023, expanded beyond football in August of that year by signing a multi-year agreement to distribute commercial rights to Peacock Sports Pass. In July 2024, Endeavor subsidiary TKO Group Holdings, the owner of UFC and WWE, made an additional investment in EverPass, with Mark Shapiro joining its board of directors.