DirecTV will keep the NFL Sunday Ticket in bars, restaurants and hotels

DirecTV keeps NFL Sunday Ticket…at least for bars, restaurants and other “commercial places”. The new multi-year deal, which begins with the 2023 football season, was announced Thursday by the satellite company and EverPass Media, the NFL’s new media platform to manage the distribution of “live sports and entertainment content” to businesses.

The new agreement is intended for commercial use only and not for consumers who subscribe to DirecTV’s satellite television service or its Internet-based Stream TV offering. DirecTV says its business unit consists of more than 300,000 locations and also includes casinos, hotel lounges and stores.

NFL Sunday Ticket was a longtime DirecTV-only product for businesses and consumers, but the consumer version is now exclusive to Google’s YouTube TV. The streaming TV service has already started taking pre-orders for the football package, with discounted prices through June 6 that charge YouTube TV subscribers $249 for the full NFL season. The price jumps to $349 after that date. Non-YouTube TV users can also get Sunday Ticket through Primetime YouTube channels, but they will have to pay a higher rate.

Financial terms of the new deal were not disclosed. While it will include all out-of-market NFL games on Sundays, it wasn’t immediately clear if this version of Sunday Ticket would include the NFL’s popular RedZone channel.

When DirecTV offered the full Sunday Ticket package, it produced its own separate RedZone version of the option that was more widely available to other television providers.

For DirecTV, the decision to keep Sunday Ticket follows its other deals with streaming services to continue showing sports for business, even as the games themselves increasingly become streaming-only for users. The satellite giant has already struck deals with Amazon (for Thursday Night Football) and Apple (Friday Night Baseball and MLS Season Pass) to stream their respective exclusive games on its traditional satellite network for its business customers.