Those that subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket via YouTube should brace themselves for some user interface changes sometime relatively soon.
Same goes for YouTube Premium subscribers as well, FWIW.
I’m doing a paid review of a few sets of potential changes by the end of the week.
I only bring it up because 99% of the time when these streaming channels/apps change out their entire UI, it’s for the worse when it comes to the end users.
And if I had to guess, it likely signals an upcoming overhaul to YouTube TV as well.
I haven’t gotten through that part of the study but I’ll do my best to take notes and maybe a few pics, especially since I don’t have either service, so I wouldn’t have any frame of reference to help describe what it could entail.
I just applied for the study and only found out it was for those two stream subs after getting approved for it.
I should get to that stage either Sunday night or Monday sometime.
I’d bet that if one actually added up all of the required streaming service subs required to watch all of the games, it’d add up to well over that much.
I have an id.me account and can get it for $199. I decided this year to get the NFL+, I just have to wait until after the game ends to watch. Most of the Lions games this year you will not need Sunday Ticket to watch if you live out of market, I am thinking somewhere between 5 and 7.
Its not quite that bad, but its certainly going in that direction. Let me explain for those who have found an alternate route for watching football, and don’t experience paying full price to watch games (good job on your part).
My Sunday Ticket costs around $50-$60/month. But the NFL has a strict policy about NOT showing games that appear on my local TV stations. This means that every time the Lions play a nationally televised game, I can’t watch it on Sunday Ticket. So every Sunday Night and Monday Night game is blacked out. Thanksgiving is also blacked out. If we play the “game of the week,” its blacked out. If the game happens to be televised in my area, its blacked out. So if the Raiders were playing the Lions, it would be blacked out in Vegas, Michigan and anywhere else its being shown. In short this means that even though I have Sunday Ticket, I have to pay for regular television as well. The NFL has created a “workaround,” but it involves buying an additional service from NFL.com or buying service from one of their partners (like Verizon). I have YoutubeTV as my regular television service, and it costs me $80/month.
The combo of Sunday Ticket and YoutubeTV still doesn’t get me the full slate of NFL games. Amazon’s Thursday Night package is not available thru Sunday Ticket or regular TV. I happen to be an Amazon Prime member, but it costs me $10.99/month. The NFL has also started to sell smaller game packages…INCLUDING PLAYOFF GAMES…to individual service providers. The Peacock thing infuriated alot of people. They sold them some regular season games and a playoff game. The league has said they will expand that type of partnership. Peacock was not something that magically appeared in my regular TV programming as an option, it was an add on service. My wife had already subscribed to it for some other shows she likes to watch. I am paying $5.99/month for that.
I belive there is a Yahoo! only game each year as well. I don’t pay attention to that one, because its typically Chargers vs Jaguars or something random like that. The Lions have not appeared on it.
I don’t think that will ever happen because of the advertising revenue. Though in an even darker TV timeline than this one I could see the networks making a just the commercials broadcast for free while selling a PPV for the game plus commercials.
Turns out you guys won’t have to worry too much here.
However, keep an eye on checkout from now on. It really seems like they’re intentionally trying to make the billing explanations more difficult to understand.
Example:
Join Now for 50% off! Instead of $140, it’s only $70 per month!
It isn’t until you scroll to the very bottom – past the actual checkout button – that they tell you that it’s only for the first month.
Stuff like that. They had me rank which ones were easy to understand and which ones were difficult, which ones “took the most brain power and effort,” etc. I feel like a MegaCorp wouldn’t be doing that to make it easier on people to understand.
There were maybe 100 examples of phrasing, so they’re really trying to pin down something particular.
Anyway, probably a relief for the most part that that’s all they’re looking into.
Gotcha, thanks for the info. Yeah this is corporate BS at its finest. Basically what they are doing is testing the language, to see how it sounds to an average person so it doesn’t fall under deceptive wording. They are trying to see what they can get away with, without getting sued for unfair and deceptive wording on their billing documents.
