Sunday nfl tickey4/10/2023 The result is that on football Sunday afternoons, no more than three NFL games are aired on broadcast television in a particular market. The league allows games to be aired in home teams' local markets, while scheduling a limited slate of "free" national broadcasts. Under the existing broadcast model, the NFL owns the rights to the games of its 32 teams. The lawyers who brought the initial case alleged that Sunday Ticket violates federal antitrust provisions because it prevents NFL teams from competing against one another for television viewers of out-of-market games. Sunday Ticket subscriptions can be purchased only as a bundle, meaning fans have to buy every game, even if they are interested in watching only one team. The basic Sunday Ticket package is advertised to individuals at a cost of $293 a season, though the 9th Circuit's opinion said that in 2015, restaurants and bars were charged between $2,300 and $120,000 per season, depending on their capacity. The appeals court ruling reversed a lower court dismissal of a case brought in 2015 by a group of bars, restaurants and individual fans who bought the Sunday Ticket. The law bars competing businesses from working together in a way that limits choices and raises prices for consumers. Circuit Court of Appeals erred last August when it reopened a class-action suit alleging that the Sunday Ticket package requires consumers to "pay more for games than they want" and violates federal antitrust statutes. In their petition for Supreme Court review, lawyers for the NFL and DirecTV argued that the 9th U.S. AT&T's chief operating officer told The Wall Street Journal in September that the value derived from the package "has peaked and that a renewal - especially if it comes with a higher price tag - will be hard to justify at a time when consumers are canceling pay TV connections." It is also possible for the NFL to follow the lead of other professional sports leagues, including the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball, and offer piecemeal direct-to-consumer viewing options. NBC News has reported that the league has shopped the package to a variety of streaming platforms, while DirecTV, which is owned by AT&T, has been increasingly wary about the cost of deal. "We want it delivered on several different platforms." An NFL spokesperson declined to comment on the case when contacted by ESPN this week. "We are looking to see how we can change the delivery," Goodell told Bloomberg in an interview last year. With many fans cutting their cable and satellite TV subscriptions in favor of streaming platforms, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has hinted at breaking up the exclusive, $1.5 billion-a-year Sunday Ticket deal with DirecTV, which expires after the 2022 regular season. The legal battle is unfolding even as the Sunday Ticket package, which premiered in 1994, could be in for big changes brought about by evolving technology and consumer tastes. "But it should be good news for consumers because they should be paying less" for out-of-market games. "If the NFL were to lose, I don't think it is necessarily so dramatic in terms of the way you will watch NFL on satellite or cable," said Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan. But it threatens to upend the Sunday Ticket model, and it could also have implications for other NFL games aired exclusively on pay satellite or cable television networks such as ESPN and the NFL Network. The case does not affect NFL games broadcast on networks that are available over the air - including Fox, NBC and CBS - which enjoy a federal antitrust exemption. The litigation could eventually change how out-of-market telecasts are made available to NFL fans, although any final ruling forcing the league's hand is likely years away. A decision on whether the high court will take up the case is expected as early as this week. These are among the questions arising from a long-running class-action case that lawyers for the NFL and DirecTV have asked the U.S. In a world of regional sports networks, satellite television providers and a multitude of streaming platforms, should that be legal? Or would fans be better served if each team, rather than the NFL, decided how to make live telecasts of its games available to the public? The same is true for Eagles fans in Los Angeles, Patriots fans in Chicago, or any NFL fan rooting for a faraway team. If Baltimore Ravens fans living in Miami want to see a live telecast of their team's game on any given Sunday, the only option is to buy an entire season of DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket for $293.
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