NFL Commissioner Defends Broadcast Strategy

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell took the stand Monday to defend the league’s broadcast strategy against claims by Sunday Ticket subscribers that they were forced to pay inflated prices to watch out-of-market games on DirecTV.

Courthouse News Service reports Goodell told the jury in downtown Los Angeles that the league’s exclusive deals with CBS and Fox to broadcast the Sunday afternoon games for free is a crucial part in the NFL’s success in growing its fan base. The Sunday Ticket package, he said, had always been a complimentary product for avid fans who want to watch more football than is available through their local CBS and Fox affiliates.

“We want to reach the largest audience we can, preferably on free TV,” Goodell said under questioning from Beth Wilkinson, an attorney for the NFL.

According to commissioner, it has never been a secret that the league didn’t want the Sunday Ticket subscription package, which is now on Google’s YouTube TV, to undermine TV network broadcasts.

The networks, he said, invest a lot of money in producing high quality and innovative broadcasts with the best announcers, and the vast majority of fans will be able to see all their hometown teams’ games for free. The revenue from the licensing agreements with the networks in turn is shared equally by the teams, which Goodell said, helps keep a competitive balance among them and produces the close and competitive games fans want to see.

According to the suing subscribers, the NFL received $23 billion in licensing revenue from CBS and Fox over the 11-year period that their lawsuit covers, as well as $18 billion from DirecTV.

However, Goodell argued that the exclusive deals with the networks benefit the fans because the quality of their broadcasts is “incredible.” The same live broadcasts are repackaged in the Sunday Ticket bundle and shown simultaneously outside the local teams’ markets.

The commissioner also rebuffed the argument by one of the subscribers’ expert witnesses, who testified last week that the NFL wanted the Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV only because the satellite TV provider has a smaller subscriber base than the large cable networks and wouldn’t cut into the viewership of the networks’ broadcasts.

Goodell counters that the NFL went with DirecTV because it had a national network as opposed to the cable TV providers, whose distribution was limited to their specific geographical areas. The satellite service is also available in rural communities that don’t have cable, he said.

And under cross-examination by Bill Carmody, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Goodell defended the league’s position that the Sunday Ticket bundle should be premium priced, even though he insisted the NFL didn’t set the price and that DirecTV was able to offer it for free.