The NFL was never shy about its intention to put NFL Sunday Ticket on a streaming platform when the contract with DirecTV was nearing its end. NFL Chief Business and Media Officer Brian Rolapp says the league is already satisfied with its new deal with YouTube TV.
While speaking with media members at the league’s fall meetings in New York, Rolapp shared the league’s pleasure with the streaming platform.
“We are already above where it was last year, we are the highest — we’re not releasing the number — subscription I think we’ve seen in five years,” Rolapp said. “So it’s been really successful. So when you measure by subscribers, but probably not more importantly, the fan reaction is great. We were really happy.”
According to reports, NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV has 1.3 million subscribers. That figure is already ahead of the final numbers the league-wide package saw in its final season with DirecTV. YouTube — owned by Google — is paying the NFL $2 billion per year in the first of a seven-year deal.
As the league continues to expand into more streaming options, Rolapp noted that the NFL is also excited about the growth Amazon Prime Video has seen with its Thursday Night Football package.
“Amazon, which we’ve seen so far, just short of 14 million viewers, is starting to look closer to broadcast numbers,” said Rolapp. “The digital business is starting to catch up, it hasn’t quite caught up but it has been significant growth.”
They are so happy with the number that they refuse to release the number. LOL. In the industry everyone knows that means the number isn’t very good. They have 100K more subscribers than Direc TV had and DTV was losing a ton of money on the product. Google had to spend something like $2B for this, which means they need 4M to 4.5M subscribers just to break even. Looks like they are far short.