The Sports Tech Nihilist: NFL Sunday Ticket Screams, ‘Show Me The Money!’

Posted by Seth in TELEVISION on 09-02-10    No Comments


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Like Jerry Maguire desperately trying to keep his one and only client, DirecTV and the NFL are screaming, “Show me the money!” when it comes to the NFL Sunday Ticket package.

If you’re “ready for some football,” and you subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, there’s a little good news as the season gets under way next week. They’ve added a bunch of new features to the king of all out-of-market sports packages. But there’s also the same old bad news that comes in your bill every year: Sunday Ticket costs too much.

Let’s start with the good news. Very quietly, DirecTV has done away with the Super Fan add-on package they started several years ago. They’ve rolled the features that used to be part of Super Fan into the base Sunday Ticket subscription. For an extra $100 on top of the $250 that Sunday Ticket already cost you, Super Fan gave you all the games in high definition. It also provided the addictive Red Zone Channel, which bounces around from game to game all day on Sunday, showing you any time a team gets close to scoring.

So now you don’t have to pay extra to see NFL games in HD or watch the Red Zone Channel. Clearly that idea is a victim of the economy. And that sound you hear reverberating across the land is NFL fandom’s collective scoff at the idea that DirecTV and the NFL ever tried to upsell the Sunday Ticket package in the first place. But the fact is DirecTV still found a way to make more money from Sunday Ticket subscribers, because the package now costs $300 instead of $250.

It is an outrage that the price is being increased by that much, and it’s an even bigger outrage that the price point is so much higher than the out-of-market packages from other pro sports leagues. To wit:

  • For $300, Sunday Ticket gives you programming for 17 Sundays a year. That’s it. OK, OK, they have this Short Cuts feature that lets you see 30-minute condensed versions of the games after they’re over. You interested in that? Me neither.
  • Baseball’s MLB Extra Innings was $192 this season, and that’s for seven days a week of programming from April through September.
  • Basketball’s NBA League Pass is $180 for games every day from October to April.
  • And get this: NHL Center Ice, beaming hockey to your living room every day of the week from October through the second round of the playoffs in early May, is the least expensive of the Big Four leagues: $172.

The MLB, NHL and NBA packages provide HD broadcasts from both the home and road teams for nearly every game. And you’ve never had to buy an add-on package to get the games in HD. So that tells me this isn’t a bandwidth issue. In football, the teams don’t do their own broadcasts. There’s only one broadcast — the network feed — of each game. So they devote fewer resources and satellite capacity to Sunday Ticket than they do to any of the other packages. They just charge more for it because they can. And that sucks.

The Sports Tech Nihilist has spoken.

Like this post? You may also like these:

  1. Direct TV Sunday Ticket Mobile for 2009 Season
  2. Sports Tech Nihilist’s Wish List: Give Me More Stat Tracker
  3. Compression Conundrum: MLB.tv Almost There, But Not Quite
  4. Ticket Exchange Makes Hot Market Online
  5. Sunday Night Football On The Web Gets First Down


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