NFL Sunday Ticket: How Can YouTube Make It Better?

By Phillip Swann
The TV Answer Man – @tvanswerman

TV Answer Man, I watched the NFL Sunday Ticket yesterday for the first time ever and I was impressed. But I wish you could choose the games on your Multiview and sometimes had trouble finding games. Do you think they will tweak it by next week? What do you think could make it better? — John, San Francisco.
John, that’s a great question YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels yesterday hosted its first NFL Sunday Ticket after it was a DIRECTV exclusive for 28 seasons. And as we reported yesterday, it seems that most fans thought it was a big success. The 1080p HD video was detailed and vivid; there were few technical glitches; and streaming delays behind the real-time action were less than 20 seconds in most cases. But that doesn’t mean it was a perfect experience. Judging from fan comments on social media, and in e-mails to yours truly, here are a few ways that YouTube could improve the Sunday Ticket in the weeks ahead:

1. Let the viewer choose the Multiview games.
This was easily the most frequent complaint yesterday. YouTube offers multiple Multiviews of the action, displaying up to four games on one screen at the same time. But the streamer picks the games, not the viewer. Whether it’s driven by fantasy football or other reasons, many fans want to be able to choose which games are on the screen and can’t understand why YouTube is still holding out.
2. Make it easier to find Multiview.
We heard from several people that they couldn’t easily find the Multiviews among the rest of the programming features and channels. They say it took several clicks and scrolling to locate them. Multiview is likely one of the most popular features of the Ticket and should be easily retrieved.
3. Fix the ‘Location’ issue for subscribers away from home.
We heard from a few readers (and saw multiple complaints online) that YouTube did not offer them the out-of-market games of the location they were visiting while traveling, as it’s supposed to. For example, if your home base is in Philadelphia, but you are in Dallas for business, you should get the out-of-market games for a Ticket subscriber based in Dallas, not your normal Philadelphia Ticket lineup. That apparently didn’t always happen yesterday. Some fans also said YouTube had trouble detecting their location from home.

Those were the three main complaints as we see it. Do you have suggestions for improving the NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube? You can send them to The TV Answer Man via the form below:

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