The rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket will be streamed on YouTube, with games airing on YouTube TV. Until the end, Apple was also in lice, which wanted to bring back the American football championship on Apple TV.
NFL Sunday Ticket is a subscription service that allows users to live stream multiple out-of-market NFL games, it’s finally coming to YouTube. DirecTV decided not to renew the agreement with the NFL and the race to win the rights also saw Disney, Amazon and Apple as protagonists.
In the end, Google came out on top with YouTube, as they show NFL games on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.
According to the latest information, Apple lost because of prices and virtual reality. Apple and the NFL had been in talks for nearly a year to finalize a broadcast rights deal for Sunday Ticket. At one point, the deal seems to have been reached, but in the end it all fell apart.
Among the reasons, there is also virtual reality. Apple is investing heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, technologies in which sport has not been present at all so far. As a result, Apple wanted what it calls “known and unknown rights.” In other words, there isn’t a known VR market for NFL Sunday Ticket yet, but one day there might be, and Apple already wanted to protect those rights.
The NFL, however, sees AR and VR platforms as new categories of media that issue separate deals, which is why it rejected Apple’s proposal that already sought exclusivity.
For now, Apple will have to settle for Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball.