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 now comes via YouTube TV, our Editors' Choice for live TV streaming. Last season, NFL Sunday Ticket delivered smooth, lag-free streams, and on YouTube TV it continues down that road, along with tweaks that improve the viewing experience. That said, NFL Sunday Ticket is still extremely expensive considering that you can’t watch live Thursday night, local Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, or Monday night games.
What Can You Watch With NFL Sunday Ticket?
NFL Sunday Ticket lets you watch out-of-market regular-season games on Sunday afternoons, which distinguishes it from every other live TV service we’ve reviewed. You cannot watch your local NFL team, however. You might not care about your in-market team, but this limitation means that you can’t watch your favorite out-of-market team if it is playing your local team.
NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers also can’t watch games on Thursday, Sunday, or Monday nights. Some international games are also excluded from coverage. That means you can watch about 12 or 13 games live on Sundays, depending on the week and your location. To watch all the games every week (including during the postseason), you need to combine NFL Sunday Ticket with another service.
However, you get 30-minute, commercial-free replays (called Short Cuts) of NFL Sunday Ticket games. They're available after 12 a.m. ET on Sunday, and last until 12 a.m. ET Wednesday. NFL+ offers a similar condensed game replay mode. 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 offer other news, sports, and entertainment channels, plus huge on-demand content libraries.
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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, if you care more about prime-time games (Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, or Monday Night Football), or you live in your favorite team’s broadcast market, other options are a better choice. 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.
DirecTV Stream offers similar access to live games, but it lacks the NFL Network channel. You'll also miss out on Thursday Night Football matchups, which are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. Sling TV offers FOX and NBC affiliates in many markets but lacks CBS channels entirely (although you can go through the trouble of configuring a digital antenna to work with that service). However, it includes ESPN, which means you can watch Monday Night Football.
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 live. Its multiple tiers replace not only NFL Game Pass, but also the free NFL and Yahoo Sports apps.
Paramount+, Peacock, and Prime Video have limited NFL coverage, too, despite primarily offering 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. Prime Video is now the exclusive home for Thursday Night Football games this season.
If that all sounds confusing and expensive, that's because it is. The NFL makes it needlessly difficult and cost-prohibitive for you to watch your favorite team.
If you plan to watch any other sports, our roundup of the best sports streaming services can help you pick the best option. We also have dedicated roundups for the best MLB streaming services, NBA streaming services, and NHL streaming services.
How Much Does NFL Sunday Ticket Cost?
NFL Sunday Ticket will always be expensive, regardless of the platform. Contractual obligations prevent any company from charging significantly less than the current high price. The season costs $349 for existing YouTube TV subscribers and $449 for non-subscribers. Subscribing with 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 by $40. At least you can pay in several monthly installments rather than all at once.
For comparison, Hulu + Live TV, standalone YouTube TV, and Fubo start at $69.99 per month, $72.99 per month, and $74.99 per month, respectively. You can get the NFL RedZone channel on any of those services by paying extra for the Sports Plus with NFL RedZone (Fubo), Sports (Hulu + Live TV), or Sports Plus (YouTube TV) 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.
DirecTV Stream starts at $74.99 per month, while Sling TV's combined Orange + Blue plan ($60 per month) is the cheapest live TV service with sports content we've tested. NFL+ starts at $6.99 per month. Paramount+ Premium and Prime Video, both of which offer limited NFL coverage, are $11.99 per month and $8.99 per month, respectively. Peacock Premium costs $5.99 per month.
Who Can Get NFL Sunday Ticket?
YouTube TV is now Sunday Ticket's new, exclusive home. As part of that shift, the service has ditched the previous, ridiculous cable requirement. Anyone can now stream NFL games. You can access NFL Sunday Ticket anywhere you watch YouTube TV, which includes mobile platforms (Android, Fire OS, iOS), media streaming devices (Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV, and Roku), up to the latest generation of game consoles (PlayStation and Xbox), and select smart TVs. You can also stream games from a web browser. Unfortunately, NFL Sunday Ticket is only available to subscribers in the US.
NFL Sunday Ticket on the Web and Mobile
Under Direct TV, NFL Sunday Ticket’s web experience was a bit of a mess. But now, NFL Sunday Ticket is essentially a primetime channel you access through YouTube's excellent interface (which you can read more about in our full review). You activate the channel in the membership area in Settings.
If purchased alongside YouTube TV, NFL Sunday Ticket gains that service's many useful features. They include parental control options and DVR recording. Even the standalone NFL Sunday Ticket includes a few YouTube TV upgrades. Multiview offers cool, picture-in-picture views for watching multiple games at once. Key Plays offers short game recaps. You can chat with fellow NFL fans.
In addition, you can access NFL Sunday Ticket through YouTube's mobile apps. If you're watching an NFL Short on mobile, you can immediately fire up a live game. NFL Sunday Ticket now gives you unlimited concurrent streams at home and lets you stream simultaneously on two more devices on the go.
NFL Sunday Ticket games are all live broadcasts, so you will have to sit through commercials as with any other live TV streaming service. Alternatively, you could wait to watch the Short Cut versions of games. NFL+ hardly shows any ads in its replays, so that might be a better option if you still want to watch a game in its entirety or are planning not to watch the games live anyway.
We tested NFL Sunday Ticket by flipping through games and streaming several at the same time on Sunday afternoon. We didn’t experience any issues with laggy video or weak audio when we 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. For comparison, Fubo will stream some NFL games this season 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 offers 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 helping to protect your privacy online, but not all video streaming services let you stream content over a VPN connection due to potential regional content restrictions. Under DirecTV, we previously tried streaming 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, we have had issues accessing YouTube TV via a VPN in the past.
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 are always finding new ways to detect and block VPN traffic to their sites.
NFL Sunday Ticket Is a Lot of Football for a Lot of Money
NFL Sunday Ticket is an expensive sports streaming service that caters to football fanatics. If you live in your favorite team's coverage market, a subscription isn't worth the price unless you have a deep need to see every Sunday game. Furthermore, you must pay for a YouTube TV subscription (or find another service) to check out prime-time and postseason games. Still, NFL Sunday Ticket is the only choice if you want to watch live, out-of-market Sunday matchups, and it's a good one thanks to YouTube TV's many cool viewing options.
Though costly, NFL Sunday Ticket deftly delivers out-of-market, regular-season, Sunday football games, and the smooth viewing experience is bolstered by YouTube TV's impressive features.
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