Thirty-two years after NFL Sunday Ticket launched exclusively on DirecTV, the satellite provider is officially exiting the Sunday Ticket business.
Via Jacob Feldman of Sportico, EverPass will become the exclusive provider of Sunday Ticket for commercial establishments.
When the residential Sunday Ticket package moved to YouTube in 2023, DirecTV retained the ability to provide out-of-market NFL games to bars and restaurants via old-school dish technology. Now, any businesses that hope to provide the games to their customers will need to stream the product on EverPass.
Feldman reports that EverPass recently communicated the change to its customers.
“Our mission is simple: aggregate the premium live sports your guests care about into one authorized, easy-to-use solution for businesses,” the letter from EverPass said, per Feldman. “Anchored by NFL Sunday Ticket, we continue investing in content, technology, and partnerships to help you create a game day experience your guests can’t get at home.”
Starting with the 2026 season, commercial establishments won’t be able to get Sunday Ticket without having the infrastructure to support the kind of high-speed Internet connectivity that allows the games to be streamed without glitches and/or buffering.
DirecTV addressed the change on its website.
“Absent an agreement with DirecTV For Business, EverPass is forcing businesses to adopt its streaming-only distribution model rather than continuing to work with the established platform that bars and restaurants rely on,” DirecTV said, per Feldman. “At a time when many businesses are already managing rising costs and tight margins, this approach risks adding financial pressures and operational complexity.”
Those businesses will have to adapt, if they hope to attract football fans who choose not to pay the deliberately jacked-up fee for residential Sunday Ticket aimed at getting enough of them to choose to watch the games provided by their local CBS and/or Fox affiliates. Because the pending antitrust lawsuit against the NFL over Sunday Ticket pricing has yet to force the league to adopt a cheaper in-home model, there will continue to be plenty of people who flock to nearby watering holes for the ability to monitor the whole slate of Sunday afternoon games.
If/when the current pricing model for Sunday Ticket implodes, the demand for Sunday Ticket in commercial establishments will drop. Even then, it will be hard for a sports bar to call itself a sports bar if it’s not able to deliver the only sport that matters on Sundays from September to January.
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