Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Youtube Google Television The Media

Did YouTube Pay Too Much to Broadcast Sunday Football Games? (yahoo.com) 45

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned." "They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...."

"It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.]

[...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Did YouTube Pay Too Much to Broadcast Sunday Football Games?

Comments Filter:
  • Yes, they overpaid. Next question?

    • DirecTV always saw Sunday Ticket as a Loss Leader. Even at $300-$400 per season, it was all about drawing people to their $100/mo. cable-like offering.

  • by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:05PM (#63157374)
    Plus Google seems to forget that it is a global company, not just an American one, and there is far more money (because of the much larger number of fans) in the European soccer leagues than in the NFL: soccer is followed all over the world, whereas nobody outside the USA gives a damn about the NFL.
    • by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:14PM (#63157392)

      and there are plenty of people inside the USA that don't give a dam about the NFL either.

    • Re: Of course it did (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LindleyF ( 9395567 ) on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:38PM (#63157424)
      While it is true that the NFLs fans are primarily American, the instantly sold out stadium for the first NFL game in Germany suggests there is a market elsewhere.
    • Yes, but is the contract worldwide, or just USA?

      In Europe for example, yes, there will be some people who want to watch it, but not as many people, given that most people will want to watch sportsball matches involving local teams, and the matches are probably aired in the middle of the night.

    • Plus Google seems to forget that it is a global company, not just an American one, and there is far more money (because of the much larger number of fans) in the European soccer leagues than in the NFL: soccer is followed all over the world, whereas nobody outside the USA gives a damn about the NFL.

      This reads more like someone that forgets how profitable the NFL is in the US, rather than Google forgetting something.
      Google pays for NFL games, and you immediately assume this should have something to do with soccer? Sounds like your problem.

    • I'm an American and I love soccor because I get to wait in anticipation of stands being lit on fire and the army being called in to quell the disturbance. Kind of like watching auto racing anticipating a spectacular multi car crash with flames and car parts flying everywhere.

      Strangely, NFL games lack the burning stands and riot squads and maybe that's why it's so boring without the heavy and thick beer goggles.

  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Sunday December 25, 2022 @06:08PM (#63157380)

    Why can't you get all the games in one single place for one price? (no matter who h teams are playing or what day of the week they are playing on)

    The NBA and MLB I believe have inclusive streaming options that give you basically every game, why does the NFL make it so much harder?

    • Sunday Ticket was always dependent on getting games from broadcast and basic cable. You can't fully cord-cut and get everything because the CBS/Fox/ESPN rights are first priority.

    • by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Monday December 26, 2022 @01:59AM (#63157958)

      The NFL's monetization strategy is to essentially sell access to games in tiers, trying to get the most revenue as possible for a game both for profit-making purposes, and because some games/teams are just inherently more valuable/interesting than others. This very roughly breaks down as follows:

      Tier 0: In-person attendance. The NFL (and the owners) would like to see their stadiums filled. Previously there were blackout rules to help ensure this, but those went away almost a decade ago.
      Tier 1: National broadcast networks (ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX). The broadcast networks will (generally) pay the most for a game. The NFL brings in a lot of viewers, so they can sell ad time for a small fortune.
      Tier 1.5: National cable networks and streamers (ESPN, Amazon, etc). These guys generally aren't quite as lucrative, since there are fewer eyeballs. But because they require subscriptions, they can sometimes pony up more money altogether.
      Tier 2: Local affiliates and regional sports networks. i.e. the place to go to watch your local team's game when it's not being picked up by a national
      Tier 3: Sunday Ticket. Which is basically the leftovers. All the games that are out of market for a given individual and aren't being picked up by a national network.

      The actual rules get a bit more byzantine than this (there are factors such as secondary markets and rules on airing games opposite local broadcasts), but this covers the highlights.

      Ultimately, the NFL is the highest grossing sports league in terms of revenue, with over $11B in broadcast revenue in recent years. They have a very valuable product that's one of the last reasons that people even remain subscribed to cable (and cable-like OTT services) to begin with. So they are eager to maximize their revenue there. That means selling off their product game by game to the highest bidder.

      I'm not super familiar with the NBA's product, but the MLB product is similar, with games cascading down from national nets to local nets to MLB.tv.

      In all cases, Sunday Ticket and similar packages are designed to sell out of market games to people who would normally not be able to watch them because a national/local net didn't pick it up. It's a last stop for monetization, not a first stop.

      Note that in theory, the NFL could make all games available to Sunday Ticket owners, essentially bumping Sunday Ticket up to Tier 1. But that of course would greatly diminish the value of the games the broadcast networks pick up. So they would be unwilling to pay as much (if anything at all) for the games. Clearly, the NFL doesn't think that would improve their revenue.

      So to get back to answering the question at hand: Why does the NFL make it hard to watch? Because the current system maximizes broadcast revenue by fetching the highest possible price for the broadcast rights to each game. Any other system would almost certainly reduce the exposure of the league while also earning less in revenue.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • But they all have black outs for local teams. :(

  • NT
  • Given the company's track record, it is in the realm of the possible.
  • Won't every restaurant that wants to show all the NFL Sunday Ticket games need about 60Mbps of bandwidth just to show the games, not to mention some leftover for the credit card networks?

  • I haven't watched a single game. If memory serves, after the bullshit ticket guarantees before they moved, which fucked San Diego taxpayers royally (include me in that group), Spanos had close to 1 (pinky to nose) billion $$$ when you add up the fines it costs to move, plus the incentives to stay.. He got almost 1 billion (pinky) (think it was close to $950 million) to rebuild Jack Murphy, or he pays several million (pinky to asshole) if he becomes the RAMs unwanted but need stepson.

    Me? I hope the RAM
  • The way the NFL put it, Apple 'screwed up' the deal. But an alternate interpretation, supported by this article, is that Apple decided the price the NFL wanted was too high.

  • No (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday December 25, 2022 @07:54PM (#63157502)

    I didn't even bothe reading the summary, much less the article - I read only the headline but I can already tell you the answer is no, they did not pay too much, because the data they will clean from watchers is vastly more valuable.

  • by porges ( 58715 ) on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:46PM (#63157606) Homepage

    I'm wondering how putting more and more sports on streaming will interact with the simultaneous increase in authorized gambling. There's a big market now in live betting and you'd better be as up-to-the-second as possible if you're going to do that; meanwhile, I've seen the feed on (for instance) Amazon's Thursday Night Football be minutes behind the ESPN non-video app. They'd better be able to solve that.

  • This is simply an investment to persuade a chunk of the population that streaming is non-optional.

    I remember being a kid and all football came in on rabbit ears.

    It didn't suck then. If ESPN still has NFL Primetime that's a much better investment of your attention.

      I'd rather be swinging a hammer or compiler these days.

  • "platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants."

    "And here comes the big game winning touchdo..."( ) --spinner

    [Network Error]

    Fans: "FFFFUUU..."

GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY (#7): April 2, 1751 Issac Newton becomes discouraged when he falls up a flight of stairs.

Working...