The Yahoo Finance Live team discusses the price for NFL Sunday Ticket and the Redzone channel on YouTube TV for the 2023 football season.
Video Transcript
JOSH SCHAFER: Inflation sticky, consumers cutting back, but people are still probably going to pay 5 extra bucks to watch NFL football, right?
BROOKE DIPALMA: This is true.
JOSH SCHAFER: All right, let’s break it down.
SEANA SMITH: Google hopes so.
JOSH SCHAFER: My play today is Alphabet, and specifically, the tech giant’s subsidiary YouTube, which announced its preliminary pricing for NFL Sunday Ticket today. Alphabet is reportedly paying $2.5 billion to show the NFL’s streaming product, which features out-of-market NFL games and the NFL’s RedZone package. Unsurprisingly, part of that $2.5 billion is being passed on to consumers. So YouTube TV’s early pricing for the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package with RedZone starts at $289 for the season, while non-YouTube TV subscribers can still get early access, but pay $389.
Now, when June 6 comes, that’s going to go up 100 bucks, so if you don’t have YouTube TV, you can get NFL’s Sunday Ticket. You can get it with RedZone, which is, of course, the live streaming app. For seven hours, you can watch all the games. But for $489, which is a very high price, one thing they did include, Seana, that we’ve talked about, though, is that multi-view, so to be able to watch four games at once, choose on them. They teased that out during March Madness. YouTube is going to offer that with the NFL. I’m excited to see the product. I’m not a YouTube TV user, but I want to test it out somewhere. I think it’s going to be more exciting than what DirecTV offered.
SEANA SMITH: I do agree with all that. I think multi-view is huge because we were debating about whether or not that was actually going to happen here for the NFL. The fact that that is a capability and people will be able to do that, I think will be able to attract more users. It’s still, though, very, very expensive. We’re talking about an economy right now where we face a risk of recession. That type of change, what, over $300, over $400 eventually–
JOSH SCHAFER: It’s about $100 more than DirecTV was charging, too–
SEANA SMITH: $100 more, which makes sense, given the fact of how much Google, YouTube has specifically paid here for these rights. But they’re in a tough spot– maybe– because it’s going to be hard to really turn this profitable, right? They’re passing along some of that cost here to the consumer. Yes, we saw Amazon do very well with Thursday Night Football ratings, where it maybe came in just below expectations. But what they did succeed at was getting the younger consumer, getting those younger people involved in the game, subscribing, getting them into Amazon’s ecosystem. So I don’t know. I think that’s a lot of money, but people are diehards.
BROOKE DIPALMA: I think we’re going to end up seeing here is a lot of people considering this an affordable luxury, just something that they perhaps are willing to splurge on, willing to pay for, especially like you mentioned, with those young consumers who are essentially all cord cutters– they are not paying for cable vision these days. And so I think maybe with that generation, you’ll see them willing to splurge, especially one price for the whole season.
SEANA SMITH: Are you going to do it?
JOSH SCHAFER: I won’t. I don’t really want YouTube TV, I don’t think, so I don’t know if I’ll do it. But I should note, if you are in, like, the cable market where you want something like a YouTube TV, what they’re really doing here is trying to get you in. It’s basically about a month free of YouTube TV if you do it off the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package. So I think that will probably be the number we look to see, right? How many conversions do they get to full-time YouTube TV users. As you said, they’re not going to get this profitable, but does it drive more people to that YouTube TV system?
SEANA SMITH: Yeah, which is the ultimate goal here. So we’ll see.
