With Shorter Than Expected Lag Time, NFL Sunday Ticket Passes First Test on YouTube TV
With Shorter Than Expected Lag Time, NFL Sunday Ticket Passes First Test on YouTube TV
The reviews are in, and it’s passing grades all around for YouTube TV’s first weekend as host of NFL Sunday Ticket. The out-of-market games service was well-received by streaming users, and many took to social media to voice their approval for the service.
Lag time between the action occurring on the field and when users would see it on their screens has always been a bit of an issue for NFL Sunday Ticket users, but not this week. Most customers reported this lag time — also known as latency — was far shorter than anticipated, and there were few examples of users being asked to verify their location or other technical problems.
YouTube TV Sunday Ticket was a massive upgrade, my delay wasn’t as bad as it was through Direct TV, Split Screen options and the integration with the YouTube TV app was great
— Quincy Carrier (@Kwen_C) September 11, 2023
On average, The Streamable found that live TV streaming services carrying Super Bowl LVII were behind the over-the-air broadcast of the game by around 50 seconds. By contrast, Sunday Ticket users reported they were only 10-20 seconds behind the action this week. That’s a marked improvement by YouTube TV, which is paying around $2 billion per season for the rights to the service.
One divisive issue for YouTube TV is its multiview feature, which allows customers to watch up to four games at once. Some fans loved the feature, while others questioned why they could not customize it to include whichever games they wanted. YouTube TV provides an expansive list of multiview combinations, but users cannot swap out games until they find their ideal mix. If YouTube TV can enable customers to pick which games they see in their multiview as the season goes along, it will lead to even more glowing feedback.
Still, with mostly positive reviews from users thus far, YouTube TV must now focus on building scale. One Wall Street analyst posited earlier this year that YouTube TV will have to attract more than double the amount of customers that NFL Sunday Ticket ever had on DIRECTV just to break even on its deal with the league. A good user experience will help, but YouTube will have to keep improving its Sunday Ticket product if it hopes to garner enough viewers to make a profit on the deal.
A subscription to NFL Sunday Ticket costs $449 for the season if you choose not to subscribe to YouTube TV. If you do, the price drops to $349, but now until Sept. 19 customers who sign up for the service can get $50 off no matter which plan they sign up for.
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.