NFL Sunday Ticket Could Introduce Customizable Multiview Eventually
In an interview this week, YouTube Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe gave some enthusiastic updates on the status of NFL Sunday Ticket.
If you’re an NFL Sunday Ticket subscriber, you may have found out the hard way that one of the service’s most-ballyhooed features isn’t as user-friendly as it could be. That would be Sunday Ticket’s Multiview feature, which allows users to choose from several pre-selected packages of four games each to watch all at the same time.
Users have been disappointed to learn that they cannot customize their Multiview function to swap out certain games for others. ESPN+ managed to allow users to customize their multiview experience this season, but NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers are currently out of luck. According to YouTube’s Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe, who sat down with Deadline this week for an interview, that won’t be changing this season, but it could be in future years.
“[Allowing users to swap games in Multiview] is a very hard thing to do technically,” Coe said about negative reactions to the Multiview option. “Put it this way, the feedback is, we hear you loud and clear. We have a seven-year relationship and will be looking to innovate in the future.”
NFL Sunday Ticket gave most users a good experience in terms of lag time in its debut on YouTube TV, but customer frustration about the lack of mutability with Multiview was palpable. Coe tried to soothe this angst by saying that YouTube TV is not beholden to NFL schedule makers regarding which games get packaged together, and the company knows which matchups users will want to see most in a given week.
“In a sense, you don’t need to provide infinite combinations,” she said. “We actually will have insight into what are the games that are the must-watches, and then we can preload those combinations. I think as you see the season go on, the demand [for customization] will become less, because people will see the combinations they want will be up.”
Coe also hinted that customers might see a lower-priced Sunday Ticket package as the season goes along, and there are fewer games available to stream on the service overall. There was no explicit promise that prorated late-season plans were coming this season, but she did say that such offerings were “in the mix.”
She was less forthright about the number of subscribers that NFL Sunday Ticket has managed to accrue thus far. YouTube TV hardly ever reveals its subscriber totals publicly, so this is hardly a surprise, but Coe did say that subscriber momentum had “exceeded expectations,” countering the assertion that the company was offering so many discounts through various partners in the leadup to the NFL season because it was struggling to attract customers to the platform. Indeed, although no hard numbers were given, the NFL has claimed Sunday Ticket has more subscribers this year than it did in 2022.
It remains to be seen if YouTube can attract enough customers to NFL Sunday Ticket to make their $2 billion per season investment worthwhile. But the company is not done innovating yet, and customizable Multiview, lower-cost price packages for later in the NFL season, and more are all on the table for YouTube TV going forward.
NFL Sunday Ticket
NFL Sunday Ticket is a subscription video streaming service that allows football fans to watch every live out-of-market NFL game on Sunday afternoons on YouTube or YouTube TV.