What Was ‘NFL New Frontier’? League Considered Axing NFL Sunday Ticket in 2017

Jury deliberations are continuing Thursday in the NFL Sunday Ticket lawsuit. The league faces a $7 billion class-action suit by more than 2 million DIRECTV residential customers, as well as almost 50,000 commercial establishments, claiming that the league’s out-of-market games platform violates antitrust laws. Before the trial was handed to the jury for deliberations, however, the plaintiffs presented a 2017 memo written by NFL officials which outlined plans to sunset Sunday Ticket, and distribute out-of-market games among various cable channels.

Key Details:

• The NFL considered distributing out-of-market games on a variety of cable channels, from ESPN to TNT.
• The memo was written two years after the initial filing of the Sunday Ticket lawsuit.
• The plan could serve as a blueprint for the league to distribute out-of-market games on streamers like Prime Video and Peacock if it loses the suit.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs introduced the memo into evidence during their closing arguments on Wednesday. Titled “NFL New Frontier,” it laid out plans for how the league could potentially distribute out-of-market games in a post-Sunday Ticket landscape.

The plan still called for Sunday afternoon contests to air on CBS and Fox for in-market fans. But out-of-market games would be split among a variety of mainstream cable sports channels, including FS1, ESPN, TNT, NFL Network and CBS Sports Network.

CBS and Fox would have had to pay 25% less per game under the terms of the new arrangement. The NFL’s two main broadcasting partners have always been leery of making out-of-market games more widely available, as they could sap the audience of each channel during in-market broadcasts, so the decrease in rights fees was likely intended to help soften the blow of shifting out-of-market games to widely available cable channels.

Could ‘New Frontier’ Memo Help Guide NFL if it Loses Sunday Ticket Trial?

The “NFL New Frontier” dispatch was first written in 2017, two years after the DIRECTV/Sunday Ticket lawsuit was first filed. It shows the league was thinking about potential paths forward if it could no longer sell out-of-market rights for all teams as a single package, and it could prove useful if the league winds up on the losing side of the case, as many legal experts think is likely.

If the league does turn to the memorandum for guidance after a loss in the suit, however, it will likely have to rethink the plan of distributing the games on cable channels. The continued decline in pay-TV subscribers makes it difficult to argue that cable networks are the right place for America’s most popular sport, and sending out-of-market games to streaming platforms makes much more sense in my eyes.

Obviously, such a plan would require the working out of myriad details. The league would have to work with its various streaming partners to price their respective out-of-market packages sensibly, as it would almost certainly no longer be able to charge hundreds of dollars per season for a service that didn’t offer every out-of-market contest. The league currently distributes select games on ESPN+, Paramount+, Peacock and Prime Video, and will offer a Christmas Day doubleheader on Netflix this season. Could these services each take a slice of out-of-market NFL games if Sunday Ticket bites the dust?

It’s also worth wondering if NFL Sunday Ticket will be an attractive product if it survives, once its current deal with YouTube TV ends in 2030. Google is paying $2 billion per season for the package, and analysts have estimated that the service would need to attract around 4 million customers per season for Google and YouTube to simply break even on the deal. Last season, YouTube TV managed to get just 1.3 million customers to sign up, even though Sunday Ticket was available without a base YouTube TV subscription.

All such questions about the distribution of out-of-market NFL matchups will have to wait until the jury returns with a verdict, and possibly far longer. The NFL is virtually guaranteed to appeal the case if it loses, and it could wind up before the Supreme Court before all is said and done. League officials have stringently defended NFL Sunday Ticket throughout the trial, maintaining the service is intended to be a premium product and should be priced accordingly.