Google wants Sunday Ticket?

[displacedinMN]

Is Google eyeing the NFL's Sunday Ticket package?

Could Google make a play for an NFL package? The Sunday Ticket contract, which costs DirecTV roughly $1 billion per season, is up after the 2014 season.

Is Google ready for some football?

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell is in Silicon Valley this week and that's all it took to get tongues wagging that the Internet search giant and parent of YouTube is eager to get a piece of the action.

The only NFL TV package that will be available anytime soon is satellite broadcaster DirecTV's Sunday Ticket package, which allows subscribers access to every NFL game on Sunday afternoons. It is ideal for a fan who roots for a team whose games are not routinely available or for obsessed fans who like to watch multiple games at the same time.

The Sunday Ticket contract, which costs DirecTV roughly $1 billion per season, is up after the 2014 season. While that seems like a long way off, the NFL likes to renegotiate TV deals a few years in advance.

If Google were to go after Sunday Ticket, it would likely be with the intention of streaming the games over the Internet, which is known in the industry as going over the top. Such a move would be intriguing to say the least and was a topic of conversation between the NFL and Google, according to All Things Digital.

Of DirecTV's 20 million subscribers, about 2 million get Sunday Ticket at an average price of $250 per season. DirecTV also gets revenue from its Sunday Ticket mobile package that allows customers to watch games on their phones.

An over the top offering of Sunday Ticket could greatly increase the potential audience far beyond DirecTV and Google certainly has deep enough pockets to make the NFL think very seriously about such a bold offer.

But -- there is always a but -- there are other things to consider including how CBS and Fox would feel about a Google package.

The concern of CBS and Fox would primarily be that if enough people were watching football games online that were not available in their town, it could hurt the ratings for their local stations. Even though the ratings for a game watched on Sunday Ticket count toward CBS and Fox's national rating, a Los Angeles resident watching a game in the Washington market doesn't do their local stations any good.

This is why the NFL has resisted the urge to offer Sunday Ticket to cable operators such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast who would be very eager to get the package away from DirecTV. The risk is that it would ultimately harm CBS and Fox and make them less eager to spend so much on football.

The NFL declined to comment on Google and Sunday Ticket as did Google. A league spokesman said it often meets with "innovative leaders in Silicon Valley and around the world" and is "constantly looking for ways to make our game better on the field."

While the NFL is staying quiet, just floating the idea of a rival bidder for Sunday Ticket may be enough to get DirecTV to shell out more cash to hold onto its package.

This is the main reason I have Directv. Cable around here is bad and unclear.
Directv is much easier to navigate.

Just bought a new big HDTV.

What if you do not have a good enough connection? Many in rural areas use it. Bars also.
Many other articles out there about this.

Thoughts?

[cdcox]

Very nice explanation of the problem by CrazyPhuD.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by CrazyPhuD

(giant wall o' text)

I think you're vastly overstating how "perfect" this thing would need to be to be wildly popular. The article doesn't even say that Google's only option would be to be an exclusive provider like DirecTV, so it's entirely possible that there would still be some traditional cable/satellite provider that gets NFLST while Google takes over the online streaming.

After all, there are still plenty of people in this country who can't even get a broadband internet connection, so I'd be pretty surprised if the NFL would sign a near-term contract that eliminated a giant group like that.

[In58men]

I like the idea of purchasing individual channels for certain teams. In order to watch all Chief games you'll have to pay a one time fee of $25 or some shit.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by Inmem58

I like the idea of purchasing individual channels for certain teams. In order to watch all Chief games you'll have to pay a one time fee of $25 or some shit.

People always say that but ignore the fact that you wouldn't really get a ton of savings (in terms of what DTV would have to charge) if they did it that way. As it is, 99% of people watch two games per week on NFLST. Your suggestion would reduce that to one.

So if anything, it might drop the price 50% (and even that's probably much more than they'd really do). There's no way in hell it would ever be $25.

[Mr. Plow]

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

Google Doesn't do TV? That's cute
Posted via Mobile Device

That was my thought as well.

[jjjayb]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

No way. Google doesn't do TV. Look for Netflix to beat them out. They got Emmy's in their first attempt. NFL likes safe, not the gamble.

You live in a cave? Ever heard of Google fiber?

https://static.googleusercontent.com...ugust-2013.pdf

[BigMeatballDave]

Originally Posted by Chiefs Pantalones

CBS and FOX wouldn't get the ratings if they streamed it. The reason they allow a service like NFLST is because CBS and FOX still get the ratings. If this happens, and I don't think it will, I'm sure something will be worked out. I really don't see how DirecTV loses it though.

Money talks. Google has plenty of it.

[displacedinMN]

Originally Posted by TrueFanDave

Money talks. Google has plenty of it.

True. I would think money to spare.

Those of us with DTV were relieved that the price was cut last year and this year. I am not sure why or who paid for the difference, but I liked it.

Still can't figure out why they could not BOTH carry it, because it would be delivered by different mediums. A little competition.

Or does the NFL not want competition?

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by CrazyPhuD

So what I do right now is building a next generation system for delivering high quality high definition video over mobile networks. While my problem is somewhat different(and I specifically don't do live because of the technology involved) it touches on many of the areas involved here.

The biggest issue is that liveTV is fundamentally like any other Real-Time system. Data needs to be delivered as it is generated an if it's delivered late it can have no value.

The challenge is, the internet was never architected to be a real time system. Broadcast TV(either via Cable, Satellite or Over The Air) was architected from the outset to deliver reliable real-time video(well most of the time ).

They do this by 'owning' the network links. In the early days they would literally lay telecom links between cities to deliver a reliable dedicated connection to deliver real time TV.

Today most of that reliable transmission network is done via satellite links. They spend major money to make sure both the uplink and downlink are reliable communications. Some of them might be shifting over to lank links but you still see the big satellite dishes at cable offices/local networks to handle the up/downlinks.

Now do you have to have hyper reliable network hardware to make a real time network work? No of course not you can use software to provide high 'system reliability' from unreliable components.

With on demand TV they can tolerate variable network performance by aggressively caching data. If your link is noisy then you prefetch more and more data when you have the link to make up for the times when this link is noisy and not working. If you prefetch enough you can completely mask a noisy link from the end user. The only thing they may see is longer initial buffering.

With real time TV you can't aggressively prefetch like you can with onDemand TV because we can't prefetch data that hasn't been created yet.

Now the other issue with live TV us timing, with onDemand TV if you have a marginal connection then maybe you'll have to buffer more before you start. If your movie is running 5 minutes behind that's probably not a big deal but if you're watching the chiefs 5 minutes behind everyone else in the game thread that's going to piss you off really quickly.

Does this mean you can't build a reliable real time network with unreliable components(like the internet)? No you still can but you have to then over-provision your resources to tolerate variance in the unreliable components. In this case if internet backbone providers A and B both have a probability of dropping or delaying your traffic that's below your requirements, in the simple example you can transmit simultaneously to both networks hoping that at least one copy arrives to the client on time. This approach can work but you generally need to significantly over-provision your system to hit the real time requirements you need. This gets very expensive very quickly.

Yes I know what google is capable of, my poker group generally consists of 5+ PhDs who are working google depending who's left or joined google since our last game.

Even with all of their brain trust, what is google doing in this type of space? In some cases they are leasing full fiber lines between datacenters(i.e. owning the network to create a more reliable system) but this is really expensive and not always matched to their core business(at least at the level that live TV would require).

The other approach they are taking is the 'CableTV' approach and control direct access to the consumer via Google fiber. This helps with some of the last mile issues and when paired with dedicated telecom links between data centers it gives them the ability to deliver some real time content. But again this is pretty hugely expensive to build out all of the infrastructure.

Plus it's really not clear this a good long term strategy. As the world goes more and more mobile, landline links become more expensive to maintain than they are worth. After Sandy in NJ verizon actually didn't rebuild all of the landline phone links that were destroyed. What they did was connect a mobile phone link up to the outside of the house. The house still had a 'landline' but it was actually connected to a mobile network.

Right now mobile links are bandwidth saturated, but if someone can find a way to either radically increase mobile bandwidth, radically decrease video bandwidth(which consumes 50+ and growing of bandwidth) or ideally both. Then landline networks will likely start to go the way of landline phones.

I could keep going but the point is the issue of delivering live real-time video is a whole lot more complicated than delivering traditional onDemand video. The approaches are to either build a dedicated network and look very much like a cable company or spend a lot of money to hugely over-provision your network so you can use software to create a 'reliable network'. Both of which likely require massive capital expense on infrastructure.

While Google might have the billions to spend to roll out nationwide networks, will they get the return on investment to make such an expenditure worth it? That is very much in doubt.

Like always the issue here is scale. Imagine a 1% likelihood event of your game watching being ****ed up. If you have 1 million customers watching you'll have 10,000 of them affected by that 1% event on average. Small scale things tend to work, when you run on massive scales all the really unlikely things start to show up for 'someone' all the time.

You also might want to check out Aereo and let them know that they have spent 10s of millions of dollars doing what you seem to think is next to impossible. I'd be very surprised if they aren't up to a million customers by 2015. (barring any bullshit legal decision against them)

[Deberg_1990]

Originally Posted by CrazyPhuD

No offense but you really don't know the technical issues here. What I said in full context was that Netflix doesn't have the live streaming experience and neither does google...the emphasis was on LIVE.

Why? Because the architecture to deliver efficient live broadcasting is very different than the architecture to deliver traditional internet services. The internet is simply not built for efficient broadcasting of live content. That's why the cable companies/satellite companies and even google fiber has a very different network architecture for delivering broadcast content.

As to google wanting to deliver TV services, they already do with google fiber. AND if they wanted to deliver a cableTV competitor with IPTV they could offer the product tomorrow. The licensing rights aren't rocket science and they already license the same content for google fiber.

So if they can easily get the rights like any other cableTV provider then why don't they? There is some potential risk about local regulation and cableTV providers but honestly that's probably a minor issue.

Simply put to try to deliver live broadcast TV over IP on an HD quality at NFL sunday ticket scale, is going to require massive bandwidth to tolerate all of the idiosyncrasies that is IP trying to broadcast. Hint Multicast only going to help a very small amount. Quite a bit of redundant bandwidth will have to be built in to provide service.

If google wants to build it's own network backbone to provide service or build a satellite network to distribute live streaming content then it can offer that. But until google can control how the backbone/distribution is managed it's going to require massive extra bandwidth to account for providers dropping or even just delaying network traffic long enough to cause issues.

And that doesn't even begin to address what the last mile network providers are going to say once their users are consuming terabytes of streaming bandwidth per month. Just ask yourself this, how many people flip between games when watching sunday ticket? Want to flip between two games and get 'instant' response(i.e. no buffering) that may require nearly 2X the bandwidth of watching one channel depending upon how often you switch. To give people the service that they already expect with Sunday Ticket is going to cause people's bandwidth use to sky rocket.

High quality, large scale live content is simply a very different problem than on-demand services. The optimizations that make one work won't apply for the other. Building Youtube has very little in common with building a broadcast network.

The reason we don't have cableTV delivered via IPTV isn't because the rights owners won't license the content. They'll license the channels to anyone who'd offer a cable style service. There's no geographic protectionism, they wouldn't care if you're competing with Comcast. The reason why they don't do it is because if you don't own the network you're going to give shitty quality service and people won't pay for that.

OnDemand is a very different and much more tolerant problem which is why it is the focus of "Over The Top" services right now.

I thought ATT Uverse delivered its video over IP ? But yea, even they have issues with that last mile connectivity. Mainly with the older POTS cable. But if you live in a newer home its usually fiber to the home.
Posted via Mobile Device

[Bowser]

Google Fiber + Sunday Ticket = Flawless Victory

[chiefqueen]

That is ambitious but right now I just want Google to concentrate on making sure I can see all of the KU BB games on their TV service this winter.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by displacedinMN

True. I would think money to spare.

Those of us with DTV were relieved that the price was cut last year and this year. I am not sure why or who paid for the difference, but I liked it.

Still can't figure out why they could not BOTH carry it, because it would be delivered by different mediums. A little competition.

Or does the NFL not want competition?

I don't think Directv wants any competition. They want exclusive rights so they can bend you over for their other programming that you will have to buy in order to get the Sunday Ticket.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by chiefqueen

That is ambitious but right now I just want Google to concentrate on making sure I can see all of the KU BB games on their TV service this winter.

Yeah, I'm totally sure Google would rather focus on one college basketball team and ignore a cash cow like the NFL.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by Bugeater

I don't think Directv wants any competition. They want exclusive rights so they can bend you over for their other programming that you will have to buy in order to get the Sunday Ticket.

They WANT it, sure. But they're starting to lose their grip over it already. The Red Zone channel being offered outside of DirecTV was the first concession that happened a couple years ago, so it's clearly that 100% exclusivity isn't the ONLY option.