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?

[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.

[Deberg_1990]

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.

Google Doesn't do TV? That's cute
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[Mr. Plow]

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

Google Doesn't do TV? That's cute
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That was my thought as well.

[CrazyPhuD]

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.

Netflix has exactly ZERO competency when it comes to live streaming. They are NOT a technology company. If you want the biggest cockup in the world give it to Netflix. No way would they be able to handle the demands/requirements for live streaming. It's a very different set of system and design requirements than on-demand streaming.

While google doesn't have the streaming expertise either they have tons of technical competency which is not something you can say about Netflix. They also have tons of infrastructure to handle the bandwidth loads. Remember netflix builds it's streaming system on Amazon(with associated CDN etc in appropriate environment).

[Deberg_1990]

Originally Posted by CrazyPhuD

Netflix has exactly ZERO competency when it comes to live streaming. They are NOT a technology company. If you want the biggest cockup in the world give it to Netflix. No way would they be able to handle the demands/requirements for live streaming. It's a very different set of system and design requirements than on-demand streaming.

While google doesn't have the streaming expertise either they have tons of technical competency which is not something you can say about Netflix. They also have tons of infrastructure to handle the bandwidth loads. Remember netflix builds it's streaming system on Amazon(with associated CDN etc in appropriate environment).

Netflix uses alot of Amazons backend infrastructure.
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[Hog's Gone Fishin]

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.

I just bought a smart TV which gives you internet on the TV. That may be the way we're all headed.

[Dayze]

Originally Posted by Hog Farmer

I just bought a smart TV which gives you internet on the TV. That may be the way we're all headed.

I wish I would've sprung the extra few bones when I bought my plasma 2 yrs ago. Oh we'll.....might have to tell the wife it's time to upgrade the tv in the cave

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by Dayze

I wish I would've sprung the extra few bones when I bought my plasma 2 yrs ago. Oh we'll.....might have to tell the wife it's time to upgrade the tv in the cave

http://www.google.com/chromecast

[Dayze]

Originally Posted by DaFace

http://www.google.com/chromecast

Never even heard of that.

[BigChiefFan]

Originally Posted by Dayze

I wish I would've sprung the extra few bones when I bought my plasma 2 yrs ago. Oh we'll.....might have to tell the wife it's time to upgrade the tv in the cave

PS3 has been doing the same thing for eons.

[007]

Originally Posted by BigChiefFan

PS3 has been doing the same thing for eons.

Well, it only does everything!!!!

[-King-]

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.

Yes...they do.

[AustinChief]

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.

Originally Posted by Chiefs Pantalones

Nope. Servers would crash.

Originally Posted by CrazyPhuD

While google doesn't have the streaming expertise either

LOL WUT?

There's a whole lot of "don't know what the **** I'm talking about" in this thread.

Are you guys forgetting that Google owns YouTube? YouTube already has live streaming capacity.

Google has the money, the capacity and apparently ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/bu...vice.html?_r=0 ) the desire to get into live TV broadcasting. Chromecast was just the first step.. assuming they can get the media companies to play ball.

[CrazyPhuD]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

LOL WUT?

There's a whole lot of "don't know what the **** I'm talking about" in this thread.

Are you guys forgetting that Google owns YouTube? YouTube already has live streaming capacity.

Google has the money, the capacity and apparently ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/bu...vice.html?_r=0 ) the desire to get into live TV broadcasting. Chromecast was just the first step.. assuming they can get the media companies to play ball.

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.