YouTube Cements Its TV Shift with NFL Sunday Ticket $2B a Year, Seven-Years Deal | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Cements Its TV Shift with NFL Sunday Ticket $2B a Year, Seven-Years Deal

wsj.com

10 pointsmfiguiere20 comments

In the end, the real winner of streaming was sports leagues.

They were able to continue raise fees on cables companies while being cables top draw. Have their own streaming which they for the most part kept blackout policies. Create bidding wars for scraps to streaming services to help legitimize them.

In the era of "content", sports is the ultimate renewable resource.

There was an interesting article in the Athletic the other day about what happened to Apple (which had been rumored all along to be the one to get this package). There were specific points of disagreement, but it overall mainly comes down to that the NFL is used to getting its way on everything, and Apple wouldn't put up with their nonsense when it was the one paying.

Apple's problem is that they wanted things that the NFL literally could not offer. Such as the ability to include NFLST with the base Apple TV+ subscription

The NFL's contracts with CBS and Fox require that NFLST have a minimum price in the $300 a year range, in an effort to protect the local audience of CBS and Fox affiliates

Additionally, I think Apple wanted to do unique things with the broadcasts and might have even wanted to produce it themselves, but Sunday Ticket is literally just rebroadcasting the Fox and CBS productions of the games

It wasn't as much about the NFL just expecting to get its way, Apple was also kind of over-expecting on their end too and not understanding the thing they were bidding on. The types of changes Apple wanted to do were never, in a billion years, in the cards

Interesting. I wonder, though, how many of those demands were hard requirements and how many were setting up to move towards what they ultimately want. Apple is a long-term investment type company. Keep in mind —- all contracts are re-negotiable.

Sure, all contracts are re-negotiable in theory, but think about the reality of the situation. CBS and Fox's deals combined are $4.3 Billion a year. Do you really think Apple would have paid what it would've taken to get CBS and Fox to agree to the things Apple wanted to do? At $2 billion a year, Sunday Ticket would've been a huge loss leader. At $8-10b it'd take to get the kind of deal they wanted, Tim Cook would've been looking for another job

And, the NFL also has non-monetary targets. They want to keep the games on broadcast TV to maximize the reach. They are not a niche league like MLS that's willing to be 100% on streaming. The prestige of the NFL is going to keep it out of a purely streaming product as long as there are TV stations broadcasting free over the air

> The prestige of the NFL is going to keep it out of a purely streaming product as long as there are TV stations broadcasting free over the air

This is a good point and I suspect that was why Apple left the table. There’s no way they’d spend $2B/year (their entire original content spend in 2022 is estimated at 6.5B) to not have it Apple exclusive. Especially when TV+ is a loss leader already.

The NFL is smart. They have not ruined their product chasing short term money. You can see this in a whole lot of sports. NHL has destroyed their long term standing because they’re basically unavailable to watch for most people. The same is true of Cricket in England, as another completely different example.

The NFL isn’t willing to do that. They know they have a unique product so they don’t try to maximize short term revenues by sacrificing long term strength.

> Apple was also kind of over-expecting on their end too and not understanding the thing they were bidding on.

Apple has (had?) a deal with Major League Baseball and has a deal with Major League Soccer. I'm not sure that I would consider them to be rubes that don't understand what they are doing.

> The types of changes Apple wanted to do were never, in a billion years, in the cards

That is believable, to the long-term detriment of the NFL. Sometimes, when you are the top dog, you don't realize that things are changing until you suddenly aren't on top anymore.

>Apple has (had?) a deal with Major League Baseball and has a deal with Major League Soccer. I'm not sure that I would consider them to be rubes that don't understand what they are doing

Neither of those leagues are the NFL, which has the audience to command a lot more than MLB or MLS. Also, the three leagues in question all have very different strategies when it comes to media rights. MLB has sliced up different packages of games for a very long time, and their deal with Apple is more akin to ESPN Sunday Night Baseball than it is anything resembling NFL Sunday Ticket

>That is believable, to the long-term detriment of the NFL. Sometimes, when you are the top dog, you don't realize that things are changing until you suddenly aren't on top anymore.

They would have to give up billions (in the range of $4-5b a year) to regain the flexibility to offer Apple the terms Apple wanted. I don't think Apple would've been interested in replacing that revenue

For now.

So yeah, this is probably not the year to be signing a deal with Apple.

A different comment says that this deal is smaller than what the NFL wanted. You should pay attention to that. The decline is probably already happening.

Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that stopped caring so much about the NFL during the pandemic. Including the biggest football fan I know, who put his kids' names on the Packers season ticket list when they were born, and owns a share of Packers stock.

My own team, the Bears, have completely lost my interest. They've been fighting with the city of Chicago for as long as pretty much anyone can remember, have a clueless and unaccountable ownership, and are now going to move out of Soldier Field for some crazy football village they are going to build in the suburbs. And for the most part, people in Chicago feel like "fine, you were never going to be happy, build your own stadium and then you'll only have yourselves to blame when you hate it". Individual teams and the league as a whole are squandering the goodwill they've built up. But right now, the $$$$ is still too big to notice. Come back in 10 years and see if that's still the case.

The deal Apple actually needs is NWSL, not the NFL.

And the moment the Bears are any good Chicagoans are gonna be the greatest fan base in the NFL.

>… are now going to move out of Soldier Field for some crazy football village they are going to build in the suburbs

There is no way that is going to happen. It was always a bluff. Lightfoot practically called them out on it as well.

Hey, I could be wrong!

But none of those things Lightfoot offered are really possible. The Park District has contracts with two sports teams ;) The one that would get the short end of any changes is owned by a person [1] that is probably wealthier, lives in the city, has his business in the city, has moved everything that the team does to inside the city, etc. While the Bears do everything in the suburbs except play.

The Bears are going to get state subsidies to build out Arlington Park, you should probably prepare yourself for that. Oh, and the long-stalled extension of IL-53 will probably get built so there is a direct route from Lake Forest.

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

You sound better informed than myself, so you might be onto simmering. I have no skin in the outcome, but the entire fight felt like nothing more than a squeeze to get money out of Chicago. Except Lightfoot was not going to blink.

Personally, I am strongly against public subsidies of private billion dollar sports clubs. The analyses I have seen is that, at best, a city will break even on the extra revenue vs stadium+extra expenses.

Is your . key broken? (Serious question.)

Or that Apple is used to getting its way with everything and was unable to make a deal with an organization that has a completely unique offering.

This is not a loss for the NFL by any stretch of the imagination.

In fact, I think the MLS/MLB deals are disasters. MLB is still ok since they just ruined 1 night by making it inaccessible but Apple also destroys the MLB branding. Watching baseball on the Apple TV on Friday nights is like watching an Apple product. All the graphics and designs are similar to Apple OS and hardware design which looks completely out of place for the MLB which is also a unique product with its own distinct branding.

MLS however, has sold all their rights to Apple and while this may help in the short term, it will really hurt the growth of the MLS product IMO, since MLS will look like an Apple subsidiary more than anything else.

This is a smaller deal than the NFL wanted. They also wanted to roll up some ownership in NFL Network, and include the "NFL+" streaming service in this package. I don't think YouTube's deal includes that

Also, I'm very curious if DirecTV will have a deal with YouTube like they do with Amazon for commercial distribution. The technology of video distribution in commercial establishments (like bars and restaurants) using DirecTV equipment is extremely mature. Consuming and distributing more than a dozen streams over the internet and distributing to multiple dozens of TVs using YouTube TV as the source seems....problematic

Still stunned that they only have 5 million YouTubeTV subscribers.

I rage quit when they raised the price to $65/month with no grandfathered legacy pricing.

I joined when it launched at $35/month, and it was amazing. While perhaps loss-leading, it was an unbeatable deal for cable TV, which I barely watched, but enjoyed from time to time—particularly during breaking news or major live events (SuperBowl, Oscars, etc.).

But after adding more useless channels and nearly doubling the price, I was immediately out. CableTV with ads is a garbage experience, and at that price I still can't justify it.

Sunday Ticket is not going to be cheap, either. $65/month for YTTV, PLUS Sunday Ticket, PLUS Netflix, HBOMax, Disney+, and whatever other streaming services you subscribe too—who has the money to justify all of this?

Who has the time to justify this?

I join for a month or two at a time solely based on access to seasonal sports -- I don't watch anything else on broadcast (or really any streaming service either, except youtube itself) but I will pay 60 bucks for NBA finals or the MLB world series or if my football team is going to get a few be on the local affiliates during sunday football games. I'll probably pony up for the NFL package so they are all but assuring I'm locked in for 120 bucks a month for half a year or whatever it ends up costing. I'll still cancel immediately after the super bowl though.

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