A report from The Athletic details why the NFL has not announced a new partner for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. David Kaplan claims there have been continued hiccups in the negotiations, mentioning the bargaining has gotten sideways between the league and Apple.
“This negotiation has gotten silly. … Clearly, there’s a problem. I think it’s really clear Apple is learning things they didn’t know,” the anonymous NFL source told Kaplan. “What the conversation is, is Apple’s like, ‘OK, we can’t sell internationally. OK, that was important to us. And we can’t sell it exclusively against Fox and CBS. Well, OK. Well, that changes its value.’”
The report also details Amazon Prime and YouTube remain in the mix as potential suitors for the service, should talks with Apple and the league fall apart.
The NFL is looking for as much as $3.5 billion annually for rights to the service.
These companies are idiots to pay that much. The NFL wants a huge rights increase for a product they continue to devalue. They keep giving away regional games. Examples are the 2 Saturday games week 18 the 4 international games They used to only have 2 or 3 and only 1 or 2 were exclusive. They also have 3 new national games this year on Christmas along with the extra national game on Christmas eve. for example that week they have Thursday night, Christmas eve night (NFLN) 3 on Christmas(Sunday) and Monday night the NFL added a week of games but has less total games on Sunday ticket than they did 10 years ago with one less week of games.