Despite a recent jury ruling that NFL Sunday Ticket violates American antitrust laws, the football streaming service isn’t going anywhere in 2024. Sunday Ticket will continue to provide access to every out-of-market NFL game on Sunday afternoons, and viewers can subscribe with or without bundling it with a YouTube TV subscription. But there are some important things to know about this year’s version of Sunday Ticket, and we’ll break down the changes below.

Key Details:

• NFL Sunday Ticket will rise in price by $30 as of Aug. 15.
• NFL RedZone is no longer available to bundle with Sunday Ticket, except via student plans.
• Features like multiview and a monthly payment plan are still available with Sunday Ticket in 2024.

NFL Sunday Ticket offered two base prices last season: a plan bundled with a YouTube TV subscription, which cost $349 per season not including the $72.99 monthly YouTube TV base cost; and a plan free of YouTube TV requirements which cost $449 for the year via YouTube’s Prime Time Channels.

As of today, those remain the current prices for Sunday Ticket, but the service’s website includes a fine-print warning that the price of a subscription will go up by $30 on Thursday, Aug. 15. That disclaimer does not specify whether that price hike will be for the play in conjunction with a YouTube TV subscription, a la carte from Prime Time Channels, or both.

So, if the cost of a Sunday Ticket subscription rises for both YouTube TV and non-YouTube TV customers, the new price of a subscription will be $379 per season for customers who decide to bundle, and $479 for subscribers who get their account through YouTube TV Primetime Channels.

Forthcoming price jumps aren’t the only changes coming to Sunday Ticket in 2024. As of now, it appears that YouTube TV is not allowing viewers to sign up for a bundle of NFL Sunday Ticket and the NFL RedZone channel, as it did last year. RedZone is only being marketed as available with Student Plans of Sunday Ticket at the moment, though that could change before the 2024 regular season begins.

Returning to Sunday Ticket in 2024 will be YouTube TV’s multiview, which allows customers to watch up to four out-of-market NFL games at a single time. Subscribers can also choose to pay for their service in four monthly installments instead of all at once, though there will not be a refund should viewers choose to cancel their subscription early, and they’ll still be on the hook for any months they haven’t paid for yet.

Why is NFL Sunday Ticket Raising Prices?

There was no official announcement explaining the price increase for NFL Sunday Ticket. One explanation could be that the NFL wants to make as much revenue from the service before it is forced to make drastic changes to the service due to the finding that it violates U.S. antitrust laws. But that is less likely, considering the judge in that case essentially threw out the jury verdict and sided with the league, which all but ensures the case will be tied up in litigation for months, or even years to come.

What seems more likely is the fact that YouTube TV did not attract anywhere near the number of customers to Sunday Ticket that it needed to in order to make the service profitable in 2023. Last season was YouTube TV’s first as host of Sunday Ticket, and before it started the business and media analytics firm MoffettNathanson projected that the service would need to pull in over 4 million subscribers just to break even at its current price. In reality, YouTube TV managed to get just 1.3 million subscribers for Sunday Ticket in 2023, which is not enough to make up for the around $2 billion per season YouTube’s parent company Google is paying for the rights to the service.

That’s the most likely reason for this season’s price increase, in my eyes. A $30-per-season increase won’t be a huge help to YouTube TV if it can’t meaningfully grow Sunday Ticket’s audience, but it’s a step in the right direction at the very least. Most streaming services are hiking subscription rates as they grasp at the elusive metric of profitability, and that’s the simplest explanation for why Sunday Ticket is rising in price as well.