Pros & Cons
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- Lets you legally watch out-of-market games
- Reliable streaming performance in testing
- Excellent playback modes and closed caption customization options
- Taps YouTube's intuitive interface and features
- Unlimited simultaneous streams
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- Expensive
- Prime-time, in-market, or postseason NFL coverage requires additional services
- Didn't work with our VPN, in testing
NFL Sunday Ticket Specs
| Concurrent Streams | 2 or Unlimited (at home) |
| DVR Storage & Retention | None |
| Monday Night Football | No |
| Starting Price | $349 |
| Sunday Football | Out-of-market games |
| Sunday Night Football | No |
| Thursday Night Football | No |
One of the harsher realities of not living in your favorite NFL team's broadcast market is that there aren't many legitimate ways to watch your squad's games on Sunday afternoons. NFL Sunday Ticket is the only video streaming service we've tested that lets you watch live, out-of-market, regular-season matchups. The service's online component comes via YouTube, which delivers smooth, lag-free streams with many viewing options powered by YouTube TV. That said, NFL Sunday Ticket is still extremely expensive considering you can't watch live Thursday night, local Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, or Monday night games.
Plans and Prices
YouTube is the exclusive home for NFL Sunday Ticket. Last year, the service ditched the previous (and ridiculous) cable requirement, so now anyone can stream NFL games via YouTube TV or regular YouTube with a Premium Channel add-on.
NFL Sunday Ticket will always be expensive, regardless of the platform. Contractual obligations prevent companies from charging significantly less than the current high price. The season costs $378 for existing YouTube TV subscribers and $480 for non-subscribers. Subscribing via YouTube TV gives you all the other live channels and features included in that excellent service. Adding the NFL RedZone channel for more Sunday game coverage increases those prices further (more on that in a bit).
(Credit: NFL/PCMag)At least you can now pay in several monthly installments rather than all at once, unlike last year. It'll still cost you, though. You can stream NFL Sunday Ticket for an incredibly expensive $115 per month for subscribers or $145 for non-subscribers. The monthly option adds up big time over the course of the season, but new subscribers can leverage discounts to lower the price.
For comparison, Hulu + Live TV, standalone YouTube TV, and Fubo start at $82.99 per month, $82.99 per month, and $84.99 per month, respectively. You can get the NFL RedZone channel on any of those services by paying extra for the Sports (Hulu + Live TV), Sports Plus (YouTube TV), or Sports Plus with NFL RedZone (Fubo) add-ons. Hulu's add-on costs $9.99 per month, while the other two are $10.99 per month. Even with those add-ons, these three services each cost much less than NFL Sunday Ticket.
What You Can Watch With NFL Sunday Ticket?
NFL Sunday Ticket lets you watch out-of-market, regular-season games on Sunday afternoons, distinguishing it from every other live TV service we've reviewed. However, you cannot watch your local NFL team. You might not care about your in-market team, but this limitation means you can't watch your favorite out-of-market team if it is playing your local team. That's a big bummer.
Subscribers also can't watch Sunday, Monday, or Thursday night games, as they're exclusive to other stations and platforms. That means you can watch about 12 or 13 games live on Sundays, depending on the week and your location. Want even more football? You must combine NFL Sunday Ticket with another service, such as ESPN+ or Prime Video, to watch all the games every week (including during the postseason). Since you're already in YouTube's ecosystem, consider subscribing to the full YouTube TV, as most games are found on the traditional broadcast channels the service provides.
However, you get cool, 30-minute, commercial-free replays (called Short Cuts) of NFL Sunday Ticket contests. They're available after 12 a.m. ET on Sunday and last until 12 a.m. ET Wednesday. NFL+ provides a similar condensed game replay mode. However, the service lacks additional on-demand content. Most other live TV services have a distinct advantage over NFL Sunday Ticket in that they do not solely focus on NFL coverage. Many provide other news, sports, entertainment, and huge, on-demand content libraries.
How does NFL Sunday Ticket's coverage compare with other NFL streaming services? First and foremost, NFL Sunday Ticket is the only legal way to watch live, out-of-market NFL games on Sunday afternoon. However, other options are better if you care more about prime-time games (Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, or Monday Night Football) or live in your favorite team’s broadcast market. For instance, Fubo, Hulu + Live TV, and YouTube TV let you watch every prime-time and in-market game (those that air on CBS and FOX) each week. Those services cover about seven games per week and let you watch postseason games. Meanwhile, Netflix has the exclusive rights to the NFL's Christmas Day games.
But wait, there's more! DirecTV provides similar access to live games but lacks the NFL Network channel. You'll also miss out on Thursday Night Football matchups, which are now exclusive to Prime Video. Sling TV has FOX and NBC affiliates in many markets but lacks CBS channels (although you can configure a digital antenna to work with that service).
NFL+ is a standalone service that lets you watch replays of every game each week, regardless of your location. It includes games going back several years and is the only legitimate way to ensure that you can watch every regular-season and postseason NFL game, albeit not all of them are live. The service's multiple tiers replace NFL Game Pass and the free NFL and Yahoo Sports apps.
Paramount+ and Peacock have limited NFL coverage, too, despite primarily delivering on-demand content. For example, Paramount+ Premium subscribers can watch live streams of NFL games that air on local CBS stations on Sunday afternoons. People who subscribe to Peacock's Premium tier can stream Sunday Night Football games.
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(Credit: NFL/PCMag)The NFL Sunday Ticket Viewing Experience
You can access NFL Sunday Ticket anywhere you watch YouTube, which includes mobile platforms (Android, Fire OS, iOS), media streaming devices (Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku), game consoles (PlayStation and Xbox), smart TVs, and web browsers. Note that NFL Sunday Ticket is only available to subscribers in the US.
Under DirecTV, NFL Sunday Ticket's web experience was a mess. Under YouTube, NFL Sunday Ticket is an easy-to-navigate channel. I had no problem browsing games and exploring NFL Sunday Ticket's many YouTube-powered offerings.
If purchased alongside YouTube TV, NFL Sunday Ticket gains many useful features from that service, including parental control options and DVR recording. Even the standalone NFL Sunday Ticket via the YouTube Premium Channels includes several YouTube TV upgrades. For example, Multiview provides extremely cool, picture-in-picture views that let me watch up to four games at once. It's great if you're into fantasy leagues; you can connect your Yahoo fantasy league account to see how big plays impact your team's stats. And the Key Plays feature has short game recaps that let me quickly catch up on missed highlights.
NFL Sunday Ticket games are all live broadcasts, so I sat through commercials like any other live TV streaming service. Alternatively, I could wait to watch the ad-free Short Cut versions of games. NFL+ rarely shows ads in its replays, so it may be a better option if you want to watch a game in its entirety or are planning not to watch the games live anyway. NFL Sunday Ticket's Spoiler Mode was a feature I appreciated when catching up on missed matchups. It let me hide scores to enjoy replays as if they were live.
(Credit: NFL/PCMag)I tested NFL Sunday Ticket by flipping through games and simultaneously streaming several matchups. I didn’t experience any issues with laggy video or weak audio when I tested the service on a desktop PC and a phone over home Ethernet and Wi-Fi networks (200Mbps download).
The picture quality looked better than NFL+ and on par with top video streaming services. An NFL Sunday Ticket representative said that CBS broadcasts in 1080i, while FOX broadcasts in 720p. That makes a big difference on a TV, but less so on a phone's smaller screen. For comparison, Fubo streams some NFL games in 4K. Hulu + Live TV, Paramount+, and YouTube TV all support up to 1080p/60fps streams on select channels and platforms.
NFL Sunday Ticket includes closed captions for all its live content. One accessibility feature that no live TV service has is audio descriptions or audible narrations of on-screen actions that would not be otherwise discernible from dialog alone. We've only seen support for this feature for on-demand movies and shows on Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, and Prime Video.
Can You Watch NFL Sunday Ticket With a VPN?
A VPN is an excellent tool for protecting your privacy online, but not all video streaming services let you stream content over a VPN connection due to potential regional content restrictions. When DirecTV had NFL Sunday Ticket, I streamed a Sunday afternoon game from a phone and PC (both were connected to a US-based Mullvad VPN server) and did not encounter any issues. However, I have had issues accessing YouTube TV with the same VPN service.
Even if your VPN and video streaming service work together for now, there's no guarantee that they will continue to do so. Video streaming services always find new ways to detect and block VPN traffic to their sites.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: NFL/YouTube)
NFL Sunday Ticket
Powered by YouTube, NFL Sunday Ticket lets you stream out-of-market, regular-season, Sunday football games using the service's many excellent viewing tools, but it requires deep pockets.