Daniel Kaplan, Sports Business Writer at The Athletic, joins Cheddar News to break down the NFL's move to enter the streaming space despite limitations to its own product and what it means for the league's impending Sunday Ticket rights deal.

Closing Bell

What the NFL Entering the Streaming Wars Means For Sunday Ticket

Okay, well, the NFL is entering at the streaming wars launching its own direct consumer subscription service to $5 a month service includes live local and prime time regular and postseason games out of market preseason games plus NFL network shows on demand and archive programming. So joining me now is Daniel Kaplan sports business writer at the athletic Daniel. It's good to see you. Do you think this is a smart move? I mean there's definitely a lot of competition in this space, but do you think that there will be demand, there's going to be demand for anything with NFL next to it? The NFL is the, the £900 gorilla and not just sports, but all of entertainment. And the thing, the one thing you have to realize here is that the principal asset is the live local games in the primetime games that had been delivered mobile phones previously and the league was unable to reach an agreement with mobile carriers for a new deal. So this package had to go somewhere. And so this is, this is part of building NFL Plus, interesting. And now we've seen some big announcements in this space, Obviously the top streaming competitors already out there want to get their hands on sports more and more. We know tom brady, once he does officially retire for good, he's going to Fox sports and so there certainly is competition. Daniel does this customer subscribe to all of these services or do you think there NFL specific, it's, it's NFL specifically, this is for NFL fans, uh, if you, if you're a casual fan, you don't need, you don't need it on the go the NFL, which is what NFL Plus does by giving you the live local games. You watch a game every now and then on the big Tv or at a party. It's really, this is, this is for avid fans. There's also a premium subscription which gets you coaches, shows a show which mimics allows you to watch game film like coach. Uh, and uh, there are other features and that costs 9 99 a month or $40 a year, $79 here. Well, here's the question. Daniel, what's going to fuel this? Obviously subscriptions. That's gonna be one revenue generating source. But what about advertisements there? There will be some advertising on the platform. The, the, what people are thinking about with the NFL pluses. If at some point the NFL sunday ticket out for bid right now and that's the out of market game. So if you live in Miami and you want to watch the Jets game, you have to get sunday ticket and that's up for bid and presume that apple or amazon will get that. If, if that's a short term deal and it doesn't work out. NFL plus could be a home for a package like that. And if it's not, what's important is that it's, it's leverage for the NFL to those negotiations to say, if we have an option to put sunday ticket on NFL Plus? Um, well, I'm just curious lessons learned from the NBA's app. I was, I have been a subscriber to that in the past and NLB as well. What can the NFL take from those streaming platforms and subscription services that could serve it well here well, The NFL app is heavily criticized for kinks and technological problems. So getting that, getting that cleared up would be, would be, would be a first. The MLB app is, is the leader. People love the MLB app and so the NFL could learn, could learn a lot from that. Alright, Daniel Kaplan, we got to leave it there. I'm excited to watch this. Daniel is a sports business writer at the Athletic. Thank you.