![]() Perhaps the NFL uses the threat of putting Sunday Ticket on NFL+ as a leverage play to boost offers from Apple, Amazon and the rest, who will want the Sunday Ticket as a tool to grow their own paid services. ![]() This is a time of experimentation by networks, streamers, tech giants and sports leagues. It’s a wild west out there, so it wouldn’t be entirely shocking. Could NFL Sunday Ticket come to live within the NFL+ service, maybe as an even more expensive tier? How that ultimately affects NFL+ isn’t yet known. Sunday Ticket after this season is expected to become a streaming service, and Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Google are all reportedly interested in buying its rights for what’s expected to be at least $2 billion. Also at play: AT&T, which owns DirecTV, is giving up Sunday Ticket and the exclusive out-of-market rights after 28 years. Those streaming rights belong to NFL Network, NBC, and ESPN/ABC. It also doesn’t air the national primetime games on Thursdays, Sundays, and Mondays. It gives you all out-of-home Sunday games not broadcast locally by Fox or CBS affiliates in your market. You can, and its games are available on your devices and your TV, but it’s $300 a season. Why shouldn’t I just subscribe to DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket? “It’s the right time now for us to package this all together in a product that is more significant at a price that we think is attractive,” David Jurenka, senior vice president of NFL Media, told the Los Angeles Times. The league believes fans will pay for the mix of live games, replays, audio, and library and coaching content. But the NFL has a complex ecosystem of broadcast and streaming rights with its various media partners, many of whom offer their own paid streaming apps, so this isn’t a surprise. Doesn’t that limit the usefulness of the new streaming service? The way you always have: Via your local or national TV broadcasts through your cable or satellite provider and their authenticated streaming services, or via NFL Sunday Ticket for most out-of-market games. So how can I watch live games on my enormous and expensive living room TV? The league’s 11-year, $113 billion worth of media rights deals that kick in this season include live-game TV streaming rights for the NFL’s broadcast partners. The NFL itself currently has only the phone and tablet streaming rights for live regular season and postseason games. Only preseason games can be viewed live on your connected TV or computer via NFL+, as can the replays. The service blocks casting to a smart TV or laptop/computer. Live regular-season and playoff games are available only on your phone or tablet. Can I watch live regular-season and playoff games on my TV via NFL+? The condensed replays go back as far as 2009. The premium tier includes everything from what had been NFL Game Pass, everything from the basic NFL+ tier, plus ad-free full and condensed (45-minute) game replays and ad-free All-22 (which is the birds-eye-view video watched by players and coaches). The cheaper tier gives you live local and prime-time regular-season and postseason games on your phone or tablet, live out-of-market preseason games on those devices or your TV, live game audio for all games, and ad-free access to the NFL’s library of on-demand content such as NFL Films and NFL Network programming. The premium tier is $9.99 a month or $79 a year. The basic tier is $4.99 a month or $39 for the year. Planning for NFL+ has been several years in the making, with league owners briefed on the launch in March. Younger fans tend to stream more, so sports leagues are trying to reach that demo where it’s consuming content. About 5 percent of NFL live-game viewership is digital, and that number is expected to rise. Many of those cord-cutting households have opted for streaming services as replacements, so the NFL is going where its fans are going. TV households with cable or satellite has declined from 110 million several years ago to about 70 million today. While traditional linear TV continues to make up the bulk of viewership, the number of U.S. The broadcast industry continues to undergo radical shifts in how people consume content. Here’s an FAQ guide to what we know so far about NFL+. Whether something like that ever comes remains to be seen. And while that’s not inherently a bad thing - especially amid the cord-cutting trend - it does mean that NFL fans remain without their holy grail: a streaming service that offers literally all games. In other words, it caters more toward mobile users.
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