With Apple bowing out, YouTube is close to scoring NFL Sunday Ticket

SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 11: The San Francisco 49ers new star quarterback, Brock Purdy, celebrates during a blowout 35-7 win over the Tom Brady-led Buccaneers.

Enlarge / SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - DECEMBER 11: The San Francisco 49ers new star quarterback, Brock Purdy, celebrates during a blowout 35-7 win over the Tom Brady-led Buccaneers. (credit: Getty Images/Thearon W. Henderson)

Multiple reports out there from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and several others all claim Google is the new frontrunner in NFL Sunday Ticket negotiations, and a deal could be reached sometime this week.

The NFL is looking for a new broadcast partner for NFL Sunday Ticket, one of the biggest TV packages in all of sports. It's around 13 live "out of market" NFL games every week—basically, everything that's not on ESPN, Amazon, or on your local broadcast channel. For years, the package's home was DirecTV, with the satellite provider paying $1.5 billion yearly to be the only platform with every NFL game. With massive customer losses and AT&T spinning off the beleaguered satellite provider just to get it off the books, DirecTV is lucky to keep its lights on. Sunday Ticket is going to cost somebody billions of dollars, and since it's not going to go back to DirecTV, all the big streamers have showed up to kick the tires.

Disney, Google, Amazon, and Apple were all involved in the Sunday Ticket negotiations. Amazon is the current leader in online NFL content after the company paid $1 billion a year to take over Thursday Night Football as exclusive content for Amazon Prime Video. Disney is also a major NFL partner via ESPN, which, in addition to all the usual sports news coverage, is the home of Monday Night Football. Google and Apple don't have any big NFL packages, though Apple inked a similar "every game" deal with Major League Soccer earlier this year—that deal cost $2.5 billion total for 10 years of content.

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