It’s tough to hit a YouTube property lately without running into a giant banner forNFL Sunday Ticket. And for good reason — the only (legal) service that lets you watch all the Sunday NFL games has moved from DirecTV to YouTube and YouTube TV. And that means that NFL Sunday Ticket is available to a lot more people. Like, all of them.
That’s a good thing. The ability to watch what you want on whatever hardware you have is important. But there’s a funny little fluke when it comes to how you buy NFL Sunday Ticket. Depending on the platform you’re on, you might not actually be able to purchase NFL Sunday Ticket. At least not without taking a few extra steps.
First, some context. NFL Sunday Ticket is a subscription that lets you watch all out-of-market Sunday NFL games. (Thus the name.) It doesn’t cover games on Thursdays or Mondays. Just Sunday. And it’s now on YouTube TV, and on YouTube proper via something called “YouTube Primetime Channels,” which basically is just a subscription mechanism within YouTube itself.
There’s also NFL RedZone, which adds a couple of bucks to the already not-inexpensive NFL Sunday Ticket subscription but lets you watch live scoring plays as they’re (maybe) about to happen.)
Let’s just cut to the chase: If you know you want to buy NFL Sunday Ticket, it’s easiest to do so from a web browser. Phone browsers, desktop browsers — either works fine and saves you a step or two over trying to do all this from a TV.
Note that you need to be in the U.S. for these things to work at all in the first place.
What about YouTube on other platforms?
OK. But what about if you’re just rocking Roku or Amazon Fire TV — the two biggest streaming platforms? Or maybe Apple TV or something else. You should still be able to watch NFL Sunday Ticket just fine. It’s just that subscribing gets a little weird.
Your mileage may vary on other platforms.
What’s the big deal?
That’s maybe not how things should work in 2023 and beyond. But don’t look for them to change anytime soon.
