Share the post "Huge deal of YouTube and NFL: How it will affect regular TV and how does it benefit YouTube."
In recent years the popularity of regular television has been steadily decreasing with the development of streaming services such as Netflix, Youtube or Amazon Prime Video. It seemed to me that the last thing keeping the cable TV viable were older people and sports fans who had limited options when it came to watching their favorite sports. Now a big part of this is about to change, as streaming services are also acquiring the rights to streaming sports events. At first it was Amazon with their exclusivity deal that let them stream “Thursday Night Football”, next Apple with Major League Soccer, and now, the biggest deal of them all was signed – Google’s Youtube is ready to pay $2 billion per year for the rights to stream National Football League.
As I mentioned before, the last things keeping regular TV in my opinion are older people and sports fans. While the first group will be hard to be drawn away from it, the second one just needed the place where they can see their favorite sport online, for the sake of at least convenience and flexibility with where they are able to watch the games. This might become a major shift in media industry, as other streaming services follow. Many people may cut their pay-TV subscriptions, which may prove a big hit for the television providers all across the US.
But how is it beneficial to YouTube? According to Financial Times if they charged $25 for the subscription, the company would need 1,85 million subscribers to break even. This is a third of the amount of subscribers they currently have. This will not be easy to quickly achieve this amount, for sure, YouTube will operate on a loss, but in a long run as NFL games average around 15,7 million viewers it for sure is an achievable target.
In my opinion sooner or later regular TV will not be the major player anymore in the media industry as it used to be over the last years. Younger generations prefer freedom and flexibility of streaming services over TV, so watching sports games will always be more appealing to them on a phone instead of in one fixed place every time without the possibility to watch on the go.
Links:
https://www.ft.com/content/f5437d18-58d2-4ef2-a780-cb30167ea075
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/business/youtube-nfl-sunday-ticket.html
I think it’s a move in the right direction, watching sports was quite cumbersome and now it will be far easier. The only problem I see is the further centralization of the economy.
This is great news in my opinion, given the popularity of YouTube around the world, and if YouTube continues to develop the sports streaming industry, I think it will be a major success for the company , but ind addition it will also cut down on pirate viewers if youtube manages to make a reasonable price.
I believe in the coming years more and more streaming services will compete with TV for the rights to show sport events. I think it is a great decision, because fewer and fewer people watch or even use TV, and nowadays almost everyone has a computer.