United States: DirecTV
Currently, American satellite provider DirecTV has exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket in the United States until the contract expires at the end of the 2014–15 season. Prior to the NFL's latest television deal, other satellite and cable providers were allowed to bid on the rights to carry NFL Sunday Ticket if they agreed to carry the NFL Network. However, DirecTV still won exclusivity for the package, bidding over $700 million a year to do so. This has long been one of DirecTV's selling points to consumers, and thus likely explains the large premium they pay for the privilege. Still, the NFL has indicated that another reason they accepted DirecTV's bid was to limit the availability of the product so that the television networks and especially their local affiliates would be protected. In particular, NFL Sunday Ticket viewers do not count towards local Nielsen ratings; thus offering NFL Sunday Ticket on cable might cost CBS and Fox affiliates millions of dollars in lost revenue from local commercial breaks (as opposed to national ads sold by the networks). In turn, affiliates help subsidize the networks' programming costs. Since the launch of new satellites, DirecTV no longer drops other HD feeds to broadcast the NFL Sunday Ticket games in HD. DirecTV offers a free preview of NFL Sunday Ticket for the first week of the season.
Read more about this topic: NFL Sunday Ticket
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