The NFL season just ended two months ago. My beloved Kansas City Chiefs are champions once again. And it’s time for all of us cord-cutters to figure out how the heck we’re going to watch football in 2023.
Fortunately, the answer is easy, if a bit pricey. Starting in the 2023 season, YouTube TV will be the exclusive home of NFL Sunday Ticket, a streaming subscription that allows you to watch every out-of-market NFL game live on Sundays. With YouTube TV and Sunday Ticket, you can see every NFL game you could possibly want to see.
And you might want to pony up the cash now instead of waiting for September. Here’s why.
NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV: How it works, price, and early-bird special
If you’re not familiar with NFL Sunday Ticket, the main thing you need to know is that it used to belong to DirecTV and now it belongs to YouTube TV. In practical terms, that means you can now access it without a satellite subscription and, thus, without dealing with all the ridiculous hidden fees that come with a satellite subscription.
But you’re still going to have to pay, and pay quite a bit to get Sunday Ticket. The regular price for Sunday Ticket if you subscribe to YouTube TV will be $349, on top of the $73/mo you already pay for the base service. That doesn’t get you Sunday Ticket forever; you just get it for one season. There’s also a $389 option that bundles Sunday Ticket and RedZone, a special channel that whips through all the NFL action on a Sunday, going from game to game when the action starts getting exciting.
Credit: Screenshot: Google
Sidenote: RedZone is 100 percent worth it if you really care about football. It’s seven straight hours of commercial-free football and you only see the fun parts. It’s intoxicating. You can add either of those options to your YouTube TV plan by going to your Google account and clicking on “Payments and Subscriptions.”
That’s not all, though. Google is also offering Sunday Ticket and RedZone through its PrimeTime Channels service. Put simply, this is a way to get all of the NFL action without paying for YouTube TV on top of it. Unfortunately, there’s a big price hike if you decide to go down this road. Via Primetime Channels, NFL Sunday Ticket will cost $449, and the RedZone bundle costs $489.
And that’s still not all. If you subscribe to any of those options before June 6, you’ll get a $100 discount. Suddenly, for YouTube TV subscribers, Sunday Ticket plus RedZone for $289 doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. It definitely beats the price of going to a bar every week, and it’s less risky than watching football through, erm, other, less reliable means.
Whether you choose to patronize Google or keep watching football your own way, at least now you know there’s a way to get everything for less than a month’s rent.
