DirecTV Will Keep NFL Sunday Ticket in Bars, Restaurants and Hotels
Commercial venues won't need to figure out streaming just yet.
DirecTV is keeping NFL Sunday Ticket... at least for bars, restaurants and other "commercial venues." The new multiyear deal, which begins with the 2023 football season, was announced Thursday by the satellite company and EverPass Media, the NFL's new media platform for handling the distribution of "live sports and entertainment content" to businesses.
The new deal is for commercial use only and not for consumers who subscribe to DirecTV's satellite TV service or its internet-based Stream TV offering. DirecTV says its commercial unit consists of over 300,000 locations and also includes casinos, hotel lounges and shops.
NFL Sunday Ticket was a long-time DirecTV-only product for both businesses and consumers, but the consumer version has now become exclusive to Google's YouTube TV. The streaming TV service has already begun taking preorders for the football package, with discounted pricing running until June 6 that charges YouTube TV subscribers $249 for the full NFL season. The price jumps to $349 after that date. Non-YouTube TV users can get Sunday Ticket as well through YouTube Primetime Channels, but they will need to pay a higher rate.
Financial terms of the new deal were not disclosed. While it will include all out-of-market NFL games on Sundays, it was not immediately clear if this version of Sunday Ticket would include the NFL's popular RedZone channel.
When DirecTV offered the full Sunday Ticket package, it produced its own version of RedZone separate from the option that was more broadly available to other TV providers.
For DirecTV, the move to keep Sunday Ticket follows its other deals with streaming services to continue to air sports for businesses, even as the games themselves increasingly become streaming-only for users. The satellite giant has previously struck deals with Amazon (for Thursday Night Football) and Apple (Friday Night Baseball and MLS Season Pass) to air their respective streaming-exclusive games on its traditional satellite network for its commercial customers.