NFL Vetoed Less Expensive Sunday Ticket

The National Football League chose to distribute its Sunday Ticket package for "out-of-market" games though a satellite TV provider rather than a cable network to limit distribution of the bundle, an economist testified this week at the league's antitrust trial.

Courthouse News reports Daniel Rascher, a sports economist at the University of San Francisco, was called as an expert witness by Sunday Ticket subscribers who claim they had to pay inflated prices to watch their favorite teams play on Sunday afternoon because the NFL colluded with CBS and Fox, the networks that show the games for free over-the-air, to minimize competition for their broadcasts.

If the NFL had partnered with a cable TV provider for its Sunday Ticket package, it would have been available to as many as 90 million potential customers instead of the 13 million DirecTV subscribers, Rascher told the jury in downtown Los Angeles.

Instead, the league made an exclusive deal with DirecTV to protect CBS and Fox's ratings for the popular Sunday afternoon games, he said. The more people who watch the networks' broadcast, the more money they can demand for advertising slots on the telecast. This in turn means that the NFL can extract a premium from the networks for their exclusive right to show the live games.

Between 2011 and 2023, the period that covers the class action price-fixing claims, Fox and CBS paid the NFL $23 billion for the Sunday afternoon games, which they broadcast through their affiliates in each NFL team's local market. In addition, they will broadcast one or two additional Sunday afternoon games of teams that are considered popular in that market.

DirecTV, over the same period, paid the league $15 billion to distribute the Sunday Ticket package, which includes all the games that aren't available on CBS or Fox in the subscriber's local market.

DirecTV charged $295 a season for Sunday Ticket. By contract, in Canada, where regulations require the NFL to distribute Sunday Ticket through multiple outlets, the price of the bundle is just $149, or only $75 for a streaming subscription.

The NFL wasn't keen on an Apple offer for the Sunday Ticket package a few years ago, when the league was looking for an alternative to DirecTV, because Apple suggested bringing in 15 million to 20 million new subscribers.

The league also didn't like an ESPN proposal in 2021 that would have lowered the price of Sunday Ticket to just $70 a season and that would have offered fans the option to buy a package for just one team, according to an email shown in court from the NFL's chief media and business officer.

Instead, the NFL made an exclusive deal with Google's YouTube TV, which charges $349 a season for Sunday Ticket on top of the standard subscription to the streaming service.