With just a few weeks until the start of the 2024 NFL season, YouTube is pulling out all the stops to make its $2 billion football package as appealing as possible. New features coming to NFL Sunday Ticket include enhanced multi-view options and broadcast tweaks to improve the viewing experience on TV screens.
YouTube has received positive reviews in its first season as a distributor of the bundle after acquiring the rights to Sunday Ticket from DirecTV in December 2022. Subscribers welcomed the technological upgrades YouTube brought to the experience, creators enjoyed new opportunities for football-themed content, and shareholders benefited from the impact Sunday Ticket had on Google’s revenue.
Despite all this praise, YouTube isn’t resting on its laurels. One of the few complaints subscribers have about the platform’s Sunday Ticket setup is that: Multi-view rigiditySubscribers can watch multiple games at once, but can only choose from pre-defined combinations in the grid.
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Not anymore: YouTube announced that “NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers can now tune into any combination of two, three, or four NFL Sunday Ticket games,” and YouTube TV subscribers can also use the associated split-screen feature to line up locally televised NFL games in a multi-view grid.
New features added by YouTube to NFL Sunday Ticket make the package the ultimate Sunday afternoon command center for sports fans. Fantasy football players can link their Yahoo! accounts to display team stats on the side of their screen, and “spoiler mode” keeps viewers from seeing the results if they miss kickoff. YouTube also allows viewers to enjoy shorter broadcast delays to reduce the risk of last-minute spoiler of big plays.
The decision to cater to YouTube viewers on TV screens isn’t surprising: YouTube recently became the first streaming content hub to capture 10% of all viewing time on TV screens. In analyzing that report, we identified Sunday Ticket as one of the catalysts for that growth: Streaming subscribers are hungry for live sports (just ask Peacock) and are willing to pay $479 per year to enjoy streamlined, feature-rich broadcasts.
The success of YouTube’s Sunday Ticket has already sparked a gold rush among sports creators, and over the next six months, this media onslaught is likely to intensify rather than subside.