Why Games Are Blacked Out On NFL Sunday Ticket

Football season has started, and this year, for the first time, the NFL Sunday Ticket subscription service is available to consumers other than those who subscribe to DirecTV's satellite service. It's now a part of YouTube TV, both as an add-on to a YouTube TV cable-replacement package subscription and on its own through its YouTube Channels page. So if you're a new Sunday Ticket subscriber who has never been a DirecTV customer, then these are uncharted waters for you.

Specifically, if you've never ordered a seasonal sports league subscription service before, you may not realize that on the service, all of the local games in your home market are unavailable. Officially, the terminology is that they are " blacked out" due to NFL broadcast rules. "NFL Sunday Ticket includes Sunday afternoon NFL games that aren't available on your local area broadcasts during the NFL regular season," explains a support page for Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. "So if you're a Dallas Cowboys fan currently in Miami, you can watch all of the Sunday Cowboys games that aren't shown on NBC, CBS, or FOX in your local market."

But ... why is that?

The concept of the local sports blackout originated as a way to boost ticket sales. In that scenario, if, by the point, a game was one that did not cross a preestablished threshold of ticket sales, then the game would not air in the local television market where it was taking place. Specific to the NFL, this meant that starting in 1973, if, say, a Detroit Lions game had not sold out by the point the game was 72 hours away, then it would not air in Detroit despite airing nationally on a major broadcast network. This was actually more lenient than the previous rule, which dictated that games were completely blacked out within a 75-mile radius of the stadium.

That kind of blackout is long gone, though, as the 72-hour rule was done away with in 2015. What remains is the Sunday Ticket style of blackout, which is based on what television market in which you live. CBS and Fox pay massive sums of money for the privilege of carrying the Sunday NFL games on their networks of local affiliates, with the commercial time being incredibly valuable on both the national and local sides. So when it comes to your local team, everyone wants you watching on your local station, whether it's a game airing nationally or exclusively in your local market. That's why, with NFL Sunday Ticket and similar streaming services, you can't watch your local team's games, with a 75 mile radius still used as the cutoff.

When NFL Sunday Ticket was a DirecTV package, your location was determined by your address on file. This, of course, could be gamed, and it was. For the current streaming version, though, it's based on where your IP address shows you to be. (Though this is not clearly explained on the location setting pages for YouTube TV proper or the Primetime Channels a-la-carte plans, a YouTube support rep confirmed to SlashGear that this is the case specific to Sunday Ticket.) That makes sense, though, because the NFL is concerned with what you can watch from where you are physically located.

It also means that Sunday Ticket can be prone to both errors and being gamed by savvy users. Location data isn't perfect, particularly on devices with GPSes like laptops and smart TVs. We've all gotten puzzling location information at some point, especially when not on our phones, and this can throw off something like NFL Sunday Ticket where the data has to be fairly precise. If this gets in the way, or you just want to try to game the system, then the best solution is using a virtual private network or VPN for short.

VPNs encrypt, mask, and reroute your traffic, enabling you to get around geoblocking. For the purposes of streaming service geoblocks, they're usually marketed around defeating country-based restrictions, but a VPN with enough American locations could help the same way with Sunday Ticket. In theory, if you used a VPN with a server in a market without an NFL team, like Austin, Texas, that would mean that all games would be available on Sunday Ticket since all games would inherently be out of market.