YouTube Looking to Improve Sunday Ticket Rather Than Pursuing NBA Rights

The early reviews of YouTube TV’s first season as the home for the NFL Sunday Ticket have been mostly positive, with football fans appreciating the Multiview option and a shorter-than-expected latency lag, however, occasional service disruptions and other concerns surrounding the launch of such a massive streaming product. With some of those kinks that still need to be worked out in mind, on Thursday, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said that his company would be focusing on improving its NFL out-of-market package rather than bidding on additional sports rights for the time being, specifically the NBA rights which will come available following the 2024-25 season.

• YouTube is concentrating on refining the NFL Sunday Ticket experience.
• The streaming service does not plan to bid on NBA rights when they are available.
• CEO Neal Mohan declined to confirm reports that Sunday Ticket had only attracted 1.3 million subscribers.

Speaking this week at the Bloomberg Screentime event, said that even though the NBA has long had one of the most popular channels on YouTube, his company was focused specifically on perfecting the viewing experience for Sunday Ticket customers. Having existed almost exclusively on DIRECTV for nearly three decades, there was a lot of anticipation about the potential for new features with YouTube TV’s version of NFL Sunday Ticket.

However, thus far — aside from the Multiview — the streaming experience for Sunday Ticket customers has essentially been the same as the satellite version. However, Mohan indicated on Thursday that the product will improve and evolve as time goes on.

“Sunday Ticket is a big area of focus for us, getting that viewer experience right, making that game-day experience on Sunday flawless and seamless,” he said. “And you should expect from us more innovation there, in terms of products, creator integrations, all the things that our fans — especially younger fans of the NFL on YouTube — expect.”

YouTube’s focus on upgrading the Sunday ticket user experience means that the streamer likely won’t be involved in the next round of bidding on NBA broadcast rights. Disney — ABC and ESPN — and Warner Bros. Discovery — TNT — currently own those rights, but with the further degradation of the traditional broadcast and cable TV models, more and more streaming services have voiced their interest in getting in on the groundball action.

With both Apple and Amazon — as well as Comcast — interested in securing a piece of the league’s next broadcast package, the NBA is reportedly hoping to land a deal with at least one streaming service. However, Mohan said that it would almost certainly not be YouTube TV.

“We have a long-term partnership with [the NBA],” he said, “but in terms of our focus right now it’s on the NFL and that experience.”

While that might very well be true at this point, Google was a fairly late entrant into the Sunday Ticket bidding process, so with the current contracts still in effect through June 2025, there is plenty of time for YouTube execs to change their minds.

Is YouTube Pleased With Early NFL Sunday Ticket Results?

In December 2022, the NFL and Google — YouTube’s parent company — officially signed a seven-year, $14 billion deal for the out-of-market package. Early estimates indicated that YouTube would need to attract 4.5 million customers for the deal to be profitable. However, a report this week claims that the package has only signed up 1.3 million households, just 100,000 more than last year’s DIRECTV total.

While the ancillary benefits of having customers on YouTube TV and potentially signing up for the company’s live TV streaming service should help bring down the number of new subscribers needed to make the deal worthwhile, but Mohan wasn’t interested in discussing those types of figures on Thursday, but did indicate that the company was “pleased” with what they have seen so far.

When asked about subscriber totals, he said, “We have millions and millions of sports fans on our platform, and the whole point of Sunday Ticket is to super-serve those fans.”