ESPN offered to carry NFL Sunday Ticket for a significantly lower price
But the NFL shot it down
By Christopher Gates Jun 16, 2024, 10:01am CDT
Last week, we mentioned the trial that is currently taking place in Los Angeles concerning the National Football League and the NFL Sunday Ticket package that allows out-of-market fans to view their favorite team’s games every week. This week, a couple of interesting details came out that will likely frustrate those out-of-market fans and have them cheering against the NFL in this matter (for the few that weren’t already).
According to Arthur Weinstein at Awful Announcing,
an e-mail was revealed in court this week that showed that ESPN had offered to carry the NFL Sunday Ticket package for $70 starting in 2023. Last season, when the package moved to YouTube TV after years spent on DirecTV, they charged over $300 for it and are offering it for $349 this season.
The e-mail also showed that ESPN was willing to offer team-specific packages, similar to what we talked about in our piece last week, but the NFL turned that down as well.
There are several other revelations that were revealed in court this past week from Weinstein’s piece, many having to do with how the NFL wanted to charge a premium price for the Sunday Ticket package and turned down other proposals that would have made it more widely accessible. I won’t crib the entire piece here, because it’s worth going to check out on your own.
The trial is expected to wrap up this week, I believe, though I don’t know when any sort of verdict or judgment will be rendered or if it will affect the way Sunday Ticket is offered for this coming season. It might be too late for this year but, with any luck, Minnesota Vikings fans (and other NFL fans) will have a bit more flexibility in their options going forward if this suit goes the way it seems to be going.
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Originally Posted by ToxSocks:
Sunday Ticket for a Chiefs fans is just financially irresponsible, unless you really are going to watch all those other games....which you probably won't.
Chiefs are in so many prime time slots every year that you're effectively paying all that money for access to what, 3-4 games a season? I stopped buying Sunday Ticket after Reid's first season. Quickly realized most of our games were on local network TV so the cost wasn't worth the reward.
I'll just stream those games 3-4 games, thank you very much.
That was what I did last year. We dumped DTV because of the end of ST. Then I looked at the Vikes schedule and the Chiefs schedule. Very few were on at the same time and I ended up watching 2 games on streameast (it sucked).
Most likely the same this year.
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