Bar, restaurant access to Sunday Ticket remains unresolved

Posted by Mike Florio on December 22, 2022, 9:41 AM EST
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One of the most significant hurdles arising from the shift to streaming comes from bars and restaurants, which continue to rely primarily on satellite technology for sporting events.

Embedded in the NFL’s announcement regarding the Sunday Ticket pivot from DirecTV to YouTube is this declaration: “The NFL and YouTube will work together to determine additional ways to support distribution of NFL Sunday Ticket in commercial establishments such as bars and restaurants.”

It had been believed that the new Sunday Ticket provider would sell the satellite rights to DirecTV or Dish Network. When Amazon purchased the rights to Thursday Night Football, it separately did a deal with DirecTV for bar and restaurant access to the games.

Thursday’s announcement makes it unclear whether the league will get the revenue from a Sunday Ticket bar/restaurant deal, whether it will go to Google/YouTube, or whether they will share it.

Another alternative for bars and restaurants would be to dramatically upgrade their in-house Internet/wifi and stream the games. If the rest of us can do it at our homes, why can’t they do it at Moe’s Tavern?

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11 responses to “Bar, restaurant access to Sunday Ticket remains unresolved”

  3. “Another alternative for bars and restaurants would be to dramatically upgrade their in-house Internet/wifi and stream the games. If the rest of us can do it at our homes, why can’t they do it at Moe’s Tavern?”

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    You have never run a small business if you don’t see the problem with this. Those are large purchases for your local bar who just went through a rough time because of big government regulations.

  5. Its almost 2023. Upgrade and move into the 21ST century or be stuck behind with the dinosaurs. It’s that simple.

  6. Its almost 2023. Upgrade and move into the 21ST century or be stuck behind with the dinosaurs. It’s that simple.

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    @religionisforiditos – No, it’s not always that simple. There are still a lot of rural areas that have bars where high speed internet access is still not available. Many still rely on crappy satellite internet, which does not have adequate bandwidth for streaming games.

  7. Any bar or restaurant that think this will be a major cost, please reach out and I’ll do it for double what you think it is

  8. religionisforidiots says:
    December 22, 2022 at 10:24 am
    Its almost 2023. Upgrade and move into the 21ST century or be stuck behind with the dinosaurs. It’s that simple.
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    You obviously know ZILCH about running a business in the hospitality field. A lot of places never reopened after the plandemic.

  9. So you’re telling me I need to start an Audio/Video Sales and Service gig? Because that’s what I heard.

  10. Mike it’s not as simple as throwing in a firestick to an HDMI port, to get an optimal signal wifi is out of the question, so next up is the expense of running CAT6 to every TV (the two bars I frequent each have 30 to 40 TV’s), so that problem is solve…now we need to upgrade the IT infrastructure to accommodate to the 30 to 40 connections, you spend thousands of dollars and do all the internal upgrade and you’re still at the mercy of the the pipe coming into your building and what the ISP has on the street.

  11. Without out of market games on TVs in sports bars, you might as well close that bar because the football season is their only profitable season. It doesn’t appear that YouTube will offer ala carte options like streaming individual games or teams. Many of us don’t have the desire to own the whole thing so we head to bars to see our out of market teams. No doubt the NFL and YouTube will find a way to get the games on at those bars without a lot of investment in infrastructure for them. If they don’t, the NFL brand will suffer immensely.

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