Now this sounds like the perfect marriage of sports and technology. According to Peter Kafka,
Today, according to sources, Google CEO Larry Page, along with YouTube content boss Robert Kyncl, met with a delegation from the NFL led by commissioner Roger Goodell. And the Sunday Ticket package was among the topics of discussion, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The potential deal is not without stumbling blocks and is a long way off. DirecTV pays $1 billion a year for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket but that’s yacht money for Google. The real stumbling block could be local markets. Keeping the Ticket as a niche product available to 20 million people instead of the whole country on say YouTube would benefit local markets greatly:
I ran this theory by Craig Moffett, the level-headed telco/TV analyst, and he wasn’t excited about it. He figures the league wants to keep Sunday Ticket as a niche offering, because individual teams want to lock down their local audiences.
The idea of this is really exciting. If for nothing else, we could get multiple bidders forcing companies to really be innovative in how they deliver us our Sunday football. We have plenty of time to discuss it before the contract is up after the 2014 season.