Google’s $350 NFL Sunday Ticket package is more expensive than DirecTV
Enlarge / Google posted this bare-bones logo. (credit: Youtube)
After Google's $2 billion-a-year deal to make NFL Sunday Ticket a YouTube TV exclusive, Google has now announced exactly how much football addicts will be paying to get every out-of-market NFL game, every week. The short answer is to not expect any revolutionary pricing packages or offerings just because this is moving online.
Sunday Ticket used to be a major sports package on DirecTV, giving people access to around 13 NFL games per week. Between your Sunday Ticket subscription and a normal cable subscription, it's possible to see every NFL game, every week. The new home of the service, YouTube TV, isn't regular YouTube; it's more like cable TV channel bundles-but over the Internet. Instead of getting the usual pile of cable TV channels (CNN, ESPN, MTV, etc.) from Comcast, Spectrum, or whoever your local monopoly is, you can get it from YouTube instead, over the Internet, usually for the same price. Currently, YouTube TV costs $72.99 per month, just like a cable TV subscription.
Google has two sets of prices for Sunday Ticket-one for people currently paying the base $72.99 a month fee for YouTube TV and another price for non-subscribers. For subscribers already paying the hefty YouTube TV monthly fee, Sunday Ticket is $349 per season. This is more than it cost on DirecTV, where the price was $300 per season plus the base rate for a monthly DirecTV subscription, which is around $65. If you don't want to pay for YouTube TV's cable channels, you can subscribe to Sunday Ticket through "YouTube Primetime Channels," where the cost is $100 more or a flat $449 fee for the entire season.