NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV to Introduce Mosaic Mode, Polls, Comments in 2023
In December, the NFL announced that its popular out-of-market game package NFL Sunday Ticket will be moving from its longtime home on DIRECTV to YouTube TV starting in the 2023 season. This move came after the expiration of the league’s deal with the satellite provider.
With the popular service switching homes after nearly 30 years on DIRECTV, it’s inevitable that a variety of changes will come with the shift in scenery. And while whether the service will experience a change in price is among the many questions still currently unanswered, there have been some announcements regarding new features that the service will carry in its new home, which include comments, polls, a split-screen Mosaic Mode, and more.
With Sunday Ticket having moved to a Google-owned streamer, Alphabet’s 2022 fourth-quarter earnings call included some pretty interesting details about the service’s move to YouTube TV. On the call, Google’s Chief Business Officer Phillipp Schindler spoke about some of the new features that the company is currently working on including in its new version of the Sunday Ticket.
“On YouTube TV, we are building the ability for subscribers to, for example, watch multiple screens at once,” said Schindler. “And on YouTube CTV, we will be adding new features specific to the Sunday Ticket experience, like comments, chats, polls, and so on.”
The ability to watch on multiple screens that Schindler mentions is a feature that YouTube TV has dubbed “Mosaic Mode,” which allows users to watch up to four channels simultaneously in a grid. For the dedicated football fanatic who has an interest in multiple matchups occurring at the same time, this feature could be an absolute boon to Sunday Ticket.
Currently, fuboTV is the only live streamer that offers a feature which it calls “Multi-View.”
When you combine this feature — which has been at the top of many sports fans’ wish lists — with the social possibilities offered by the inclusion of comments and polls, YouTube and Google appear to be bringing a much more tech-friendly, interactive approach to broadcasting the games. The latter two features are designed to allow increased discussion between the viewers of Sunday Ticket, making it an engaging and unique game-watching experience.
While the Google execs did not discuss this possibility, it would also seem inevitable that YouTube TV incorporates a suite of stats packages into the broadcasts. Fubo has expanded its Multi-View to include “FanView,” which offers stats and scores while watching in picture-in-picture mode. When Prime Video became the exclusive broadcaster of “Thursday Night Football” last season, it did something similar by incorporating its X-Ray feature into games with stats and additional information.
With all of these new changes coming to Sunday Ticket, for the first time ever, they will be available to an increasingly wide audience. The newly re-platformed service will be available to all YouTube TV subscribers as well as any non-subscribers who wish to access the service a la carte through YouTube's Primetime Channels, which makes it more accessible to the average user than ever.
As NFL Sunday Ticket makes its way to its new home, YouTube TV is doing everything it can to make it as impressive an experience for new and longtime fans alike. As the season gets underway in the fall, it will be fun to see how these new features are integrated into what’s already a tried-and-true viewing experience.
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.