NFL Piracy
In case you missed the news, or in case you already forgot the news, NFL Sunday Ticket will no longer be on Direct TV. It will now find its home on Youtube TV. If you are planning to purchase Sunday Ticket, I would advise you to do it now, or at the very minimum before June 6th. If you do, the price is only kind of outrageous, instead of very outrageous.
I was thrilled when I heard Sunday Ticket was coming to youtube until I saw the price. My fondest year ever watching football was when me and my college roommates pooled our cash into it for one year and we partied every Sunday. Since then, and since moving to the opposite side of the country, far from the Giants media market, it’s been a challenge to watch games. I was limited to sports bars since local TV wouldn’t have the Giants on. Paying for Direct TV simply for football was an expense I could not justify. This wasn’t bad because Sunday afternoons in the bar were fun…unless the Giants were on primetime. I also never paid for TV service because outside sports, I literally never watch broadcast TV, and Comcast already costs too fucking much. It got even more complicated when Covid hit and sports bars were no longer an option. My favorite one shut down so I can’t even go anymore. My second favorite bar also shut down. My third option turned over all the staff and now it’s crappy.
So for the past several years I’ve had to make do with Redzone on Sling, whatever games are broadcast on streaming services we already have accounts for (Like Amazon Prime), and the high streams. It would be a hassle of booting up VPNs, adblock, ublockorigin, various anti-malware and anti-virus softwares, and then dealing with crappy low-resolution streams that would cut out randomly all the time and still somehow bombard me with ads to exit out of. Anyone who has sailed the high streams knows the struggle. It gets you what you want to see for free, but it’s far from anyone’s desired quality.
That’s why I was pumped about new Ticket. Like Apple found out many moons ago with iTunes, the easiest way to slow piracy is to offer a reasonable legal service. Piracy is indeed free, but it comes with plenty of risks and it’s often just easier to pay a light cost for no hassle. When I saw the cost of Youtube Ticket, I winced. Considering my current position in life and how much I watch football, I’ll probably buy it. But I wonder if this will do anything to slow the streams. The NFL is one step closer to dragging the football-watching experience into the modern age, but man. It’s always going to be about the money.
AND THEY STILL WONT OFFER ME A PACKAGE OF JUST…GIANTS GAMES. LET ME BUY JUST GIANTS GAMES. I can figure out the rest of the games myself or just get Redzone as an add-on, it feels bonkers to still not allow me to buy a team-specific package for a lesser price.
***I WOULD NEVER WATCH ILLEGAL STREAMS AND EVERYONE WHO COMMENTS DOESN’T EITHER, JUST SO YOU KNOW, FBI. ALL HYPOTHETICAL. THIS WAS A POST MADE IN-CHARACTER OF A GUY WHO WOULD. ***
I’m sorry, they want HOW MUCH for just Sunday afternoon games?
Gamepass International is like £140 and carries _everything_, the only game blacked out is whatever is also being shown live on Sky Sports that day – which is 2 games a week. It also includes RedZone.
I don’t recall anything ever blacked out on game pass international. But this option works fantastic. Only slight hassle is having a computer hooked up to the TV. But my new smart TV lets me do that wirelessly from my PC so saves me when I’m being lazy.
FFS, I was able to watch opening Sunday when I was on a plane with Game Pass international. It’s wonderful.
Depends where you are; in the UK the Sky Sports live game for that slot is blacked out until the day after. I live on the Isle of Man and avoid that blackout =)
Yeah…. If $349 is the discount price that’ll be a hard pass for me. Something like that should be significantly less than the cumulative cost of going 14-17 Sundays to a bar and splitting the dozen wing special, a beverage or two, occasional other snack and tip.
YouTube TV being $72.99 a month as a base price is ridiculous enough.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the price was set so high precisely because of that. Sports bars get a good amount of traffic for out-of-town NFL games, but pay a hefty price to show them.
Some quick searches show that back in 2019-2020, DirecTV claimed bars with Sunday Ticket got 22-33% more foot traffic . They charged a bare minimum of $650 for a bar with up to 100 seats and up to 4 receivers. In 2021, places only a little bigger than that were paying $6,000 a year and places that seated over 2,000 were paying $68,000!
If Google charged a lot less than DirecTV did for residential service, it would probably kill the sports-bar traffic for out-of-town games, piss off those bar owners, and cause a lot of them to cancel. Apparently, the league was forming a joint venture to bring Sunday Ticket commercial service in-house; I’m sure they don’t want to threaten that very lucrative business right when they’re about to cut out the middleman.
I usually only watch the sunday games for the Steelers and maybe some other games.
I knew it was going to be scary when I started seeing the $100 off Sunday Ticket ads on youtube. $350 is about what I expected for it.
The Glazers are gonna want that back, y’know. How’d you even get it out of the RayJay?
Torrented the boat
They always told me that I wouldn’t download a car; they never said anything about boats.
There’s two things that are extra sad here – (a) this is basically the same cost as it was before, except you don’t need a satellite (which is nice if you live in a dorm, or an apt, or rent, or don’t like disfiguring your house) and (b) Apple wanted to offer it WAY cheaper as a loss leader to get people into their ecosytem, but part of the NFL’s deal was that you weren’t allowed to reduce the price. Hooray… Capitalism? (only for the seller, apparently, not us lowly consumers)
The lack of offering specific team packages, or specific weekends only, or even single games is inexcusable, especially since that could be revenue ON TOP of those who’s already pay for the whole thing. I’m personally not buying any package that doesn’t include RedZone, so they’d get my money.
Now if they ever offered a customized RedZone where I never had to watch a single play from the Jets/Giants/Colts? I’d probably fork over my mortgage for that option.
TAKE WHAT YOU CAN
GIVE NOTHING BACK
Love the flag on the boat. That’s a necessity if someone were to go sailing.
Well, NFL messed up huge with Sunday Ticket IMO, especially with pricing.
In fact, from what I heard from industrial chatters, Apple was front runner and in fact, was ready to announce that they got the Sunday Ticket for last fall’s iPhone keynote. Unfortunately NFL and Apple could not agree on pricing (Apple initially wanted to offer Sunday Ticket FREE to Apple One Premier customers that included Apple TV+, but when NFL balked at that, Apple was willing to offer users somewhere between $79-129 per season for Sunday Ticket, similar to how MLS Season Pass works. In addition, they would help make RedZone content, not just for Sunday Ticket but for all outlets, and help make some content for NFL Network)
When league instead asked Apple to offer Sunday ticket at $300-400 per season, that’s when Apple ABRUPTLY walked out of the negotiating table, and that apparently sent NFL into panic mode, and asked Amazon. Amazon wanted to offer Sunday Ticket FREE for Prime customers while charging non-prime member around $79 per season. When league said no to that, Amazon also walked out of negotiating table, which sent NFL in total panic mode, and had to settle with Google, who agreed to NFL’s crazy pricing demand.
Amazon and Apple knows how much the service is worth, and they know it should be competitive to other league’s streaming service (like MLB and NBA) and price being friendly to users. NFL messed up big time here and Google’s going to look bad for charging this much for Sunday Ticket (especially considering YouTube TV’s $80 a month for A BASIC PLAN!!!!!!!!)
Jeez, when Apple walks away because you made shit too expensive, you REALLY fucked up
> and they know it should be competitive to other league’s streaming service (like MLB and NBA) and price being friendly to users.
The problem is that time and time again consumers have shown they value the NFL substantially more than other sports. Most people are going to grumble and grumble and then pay the insane price, and the NFL will see little to no consequences. The Lions are local for my parents, and I know they’re going to pay every month for YoutubeTV during the NFL season to watch the Lions and Wolverines, like they’ve done every year since PS Vue shut down. That’s looking to be at least $400 this year.
Lmao, I did not know any of this, thank you for bringing it to my attention
I got the sunday ticket early and considering I’ve been using youtube tv to watch hockey so far it’s been kind of worth it for me. Doesn’t excuse the price whatsoever though. I was all you pirates luck in the illegal stream path.
So…what streams would you *hypothetically* use if you don’t buy the package?
I have been told of a place called NFLbite when redditstreams had trouble, but i heard there were issues this season with the usual sources. Unfortunately it appears the stability of such places tends to rotate
MLB.tv gives you every out of market game for like, $150. That’s 14 games per day over the weekend, and like 10 games per day during the week roughly. For 6 months. And of course you can get in market games with a VPN, which is no trouble really. Paid VPNs are good for security anyways.
But the NFL wants you to buy 18 weeks of one day a week games? For triple the price? Fuck that.
As a Broncos fan in Seahawks territory I feel this so deeply. Legitimately I just want those 17 games, and I would pay a lot for them, but I am not paying out my ass for Every Single Goddamn Game*
*Mostly
Meanwhile, F1TV gets you all the races live, plus replays of all the races back through to the 1981 season. And highlights of those races. And season highlights for 1970-1980. Oh, and they also include F2 and F3 if you’re interested in that.
It’s $10 a month, or $80 a year. Oh yeah, and no ads interrupting the experience (plenty on the cars and walls, but nothing breaking the flow of the race).
To be fair, F1 got out in front of streaming much faster than pretty much any other major sport, and they didn’t really have a lot of existing deeply-ingrained broadcast rightsholders in the States to deal with.
F1TV offers amazing value. On top of all you said, you can also choose between different the broadcast languages (or just have the track audio), or switch between cameras. And as someone who got F1TV in one market but is living in another one where it’s currently not offered, I love that I can normally watch it there, no VPN required.
Fun fact – it’s only illegal to host streams. It is not illegal to watch streams.
Also, weboasis.app. Thank me later.
I still the best model would be for the NFL (or any other sports league, really) to offer different tiers, including a free tier that streams all the games at 480p. Let the free users have a low-quality stream, and maybe make them sit through a handful more ads or something. Then let folks pay for higher quality streams and no ads.
But I suppose it wouldn’t make “the most money ever” (and it’s probably too smart for overpaid execs, really), so it probably won’t happen.
What about NFL+? Or are Giants games not available because they are out of market?
Red Zone has killed the want for Sunday Ticket at all.
Why sluff through everyone’s game and the carnival carousel of clowns that networks hire to do play by play when I can just have Scott Hansen change the channels for me while I do laundry and clean the bathrooms in the background?
I’ve worked closely in this realm in the past and shocker – the NFL (as alluded to in the comments about Apple TV) dictates most of the terms. I think the last DIRECTV contract was somewhere around $1.5 billion (with a ‘B’) per year which makes it completely impossible to recoup the cost even with subscribers and bars. All of the players in this year’s negotiations – Google, Apple, Amazon, etc all looked at it as a loss leader thing.
I know DIRECTV had to fight to offer a streaming product and the NFL wouldn’t allow the ala carte package and still won’t. Look at MLB.tv – they offer an ala carte and it’s what $20 cheaper per year or something piddly, but it makes people happy.