Sports Television Is Fragmenting. Can YouTube TV Keep It Together?
As the TV business America knew for decades began to crumble, YouTube saw an opportunity. People remained interested in linear content, company leadership believed, but its format needed updating.
In the second quarter of 2015, pay-TV services lost more than 600,000 subscribers, according to one research firm. Entertainment stock slumps that August cost investors $60 billion over a single two-day span. Streamers, led by Netflix, were on the rise; the cable bundle’s days appeared numbered.
Around that time, YouTube’s then-CEO Susan Wojcicki pitched Christian Oestlien, a product manager who had left the company two years earlier to join Twitter, on a return. “What if you came back here,” Wojcicki said, “and helped me figure out what to do with TV?”
One of Oestlien’s last conversations before taking on the task was with recently departed YouTube product leader Shishir Mehrotra. “He said, ‘That’s probably the most difficult job you could take,’” Oestlien recalled.
Content owners would be unlikely to play nice with the rising tech power. People were used to watching YouTube content for free, and whether they’d pay for videos was an open question. YouTube and its parent company Google had tried various TV-related strategies over the last decade, often without lasting success.
“But,” Mehrorta added, “if you made that work, it might be the most fun thing you could do at the company.”
Oestlien was in.
At the time, YouTube TV existed solely as a prototype, a few channels of live television, captured via an antenna bolted to the roof of the company’s San Bruno, Calif., office and digitized using YouTube’s existing tech, viewable on an Android device.
Eleven years later, YouTube TV has reportedly surpassed 10 million subscribers. It could become the biggest TV distribution service in the U.S., thanks in large part to the nearly 40 million subscribers the rest of the industry has lost since 2015. For a generation of sports fans, YouTube is the default streaming option, breathing new life into the bundle.
However, the path from a Silicon Valley experiment to here has been anything but, well, linear.
Loading up
YouTube and Google already had a history with TV. NFL execs met with Google Video director Jennifer Feikin in 2005, before live streaming was commonly available online.
At the time, a Bear Stearns analyst predicted that Google “has the potential to morph into a leading provider of video content on the Internet.” A year later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, its largest buy to that point. (Google Video outlasted Bear Stearns, though not by much).
By 2014, when Wojcicki became YouTube CEO, the platform boasted more than 1 billion monthly viewers, but its TV strategy was still nascent. In the fight for eyeballs, Wojcicki recognized that all forms of video were on a collision course. YouTube bought billboards to promote its shows, just like ABC might. Wojcicki courted premium advertisers who also spent on primetime programs. YouTube wanted top-tier content on its service too, particularly sports and news coverage.
“What we were really trying to solve for, fundamentally, when we built YouTube TV, was to try and bring that really large portfolio of sports programming that wasn’t on YouTube … to our user base,” Oestlien said.
But well before he could pitch users, Oestlien had to sell the concept to the top decision makers at Google.
“The way that Google works generally, which I think is really smart, is that when you’re green-lighting a new business, you have to go to the CFO and have a conversation about how much money you’re going to lose, for how long and why,” said Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten, then YouTube’s VP of content partnerships, and current Wonder Project CEO. “The CFO and her team act like a mini board of directors and say, ‘OK, we’re making an investment in this, but these are the outcomes we expect. If you can’t deliver these outcomes, then we can stop investing.’”
In the summer of 2016, Oestlien presented his plans to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and then-CFO Ruth Porat. They were on board. In those days, one of the things Pichai mentioned was how difficult it was for him to keep track of where his favorite soccer club, FC Barcelona, was playing on a weekly basis.
YouTube designers had been crafting a more compelling user experience for TV viewers since 2014, studying the way cable box interfaces and streamers looked—and how a YouTube version ought to feel. They designed a phone-first experience, since that’s the direction everything seemed to be headed in, recreating channel-flipping for a generation prone to swiping instead.
But launching the service, codenamed YouTube Unplugged, would require overcoming three critical constraints.
First, YouTube didn’t control the content. Media companies did. And as recently as March 2014, Viacom was suing Google and YouTube, alleging YouTube intentionally allowed users to upload copyrighted shows like SpongeBob SquarePants.
One early idea was to solely offer local stations at a low price of roughly $15. YouTube also told potential partners it was willing to launch with just three of the big four broadcasters—ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. But the content owners pushed for their cable channels to be included in any deal. YouTube’s skinny bundle had not yet launched, and it was already growing.
Potential partners expressed additional concerns.
“They were having a lot of heartburn about the features we were building,” Oestlien said. “They were like, ‘What do you mean an unlimited cloud DVR?’ They were like, ‘How much could you record?’ I’m like, ‘Well, how many channels are there? Multiply that by seven, by 24, that’s how much we can record.’”
Oestlien and other team members, including Heather Moosnick, YouTube TV’s head of content partnerships at the time (though she wasn’t telling anyone, even her mother, what she was working on) would visit media companies in Los Angeles and New York to answer questions. In Burbank, Disney executives needed a TV wheeled into the room so Oestlien could connect his phone to it and show them what his team was building. At a meeting with another network, a senior executive told Oestlien that while he might have a great product, it would be impossible to build a TV business without annual contracts.
“My pitch to the media companies was like … cable sucks, and you’re going to lose everybody who grew up on streaming,” Moosnick said. “The faster you get to the other side of the river, the less likely you are to get swept away.”
Moosnick, now a co-founder of Create on Purpose, remembered doubts—even from people within YouTube—about getting partners to sign on to the company’s requests for a service that didn’t exist yet.
Carriage negotiations between more traditional TV providers and the network owners regularly turn into protracted affairs, causing channel blackouts if not lawsuits. And those at least had a mutually agreed upon starting point.
“Tech companies have a very strong point of view on the types of services they want to build for their consumers,” Oestlien said. “The interesting thing about working with the media industry is you have to meet them halfway.”
And YouTube wasn’t the only one learning that. Apple, Amazon, CenturyLink, DirecTV, Dish Network, Hulu, Sony, T-Mobile—just about anyone in the digital entertainment or telecommunications industries appeared to be plotting their own attempts at online TV. The idea of marrying Netflix-like simplicity with the premium content everyone already watched wasn’t novel. Executing would be the challenge.
“In a sense it was a sprint, like, who could get to market first,” Oestlien said.
YouTube lost that race. DirecTV Now launched in November 2016, establishing a $35/month price that would set the market. YouTube initially targeted a September 2016 launch but pushed back its plans twice. Meanwhile, other would-be competitors bowed out entirely.
By fall 2016, CBS signed up for YouTube’s service. The other networks followed. Fox was the last of the big four to formally agree to terms, but YouTube made room. Others in the industry were impressed YouTube got media company buy-in, Moosnick remembered. She credited her relative naiveté for getting the deals done. “I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to, and that’s why I didn’t care when they said ‘no’,” she said. “Because I was going to get a yes. I had to.”
Going live
The second barrier to building a digital TV service was the tech. It wasn’t as simple as sticking an antenna on top of a YouTube building and streaming the feeds through the company’s in-house software.
YouTube needed to establish antenna access in each of the service’s markets. Feeds would be digitized and sent to multiple data centers for redundancy. Formats developed for streaming the 2012 Olympics were brought back to improve channel quality.
In meetings with content owners, the technical requirements kept growing. Shows had to be encrypted to prevent pirating, but easily viewable on Android, iOS, web and other platforms. YouTube also had to find ways to geographically limit access to its streams, maintaining regional sports networks’ domains. Then there was the constant push-and-pull-and-push between reducing latency, maintaining picture quality and preventing re-buffering.
Throw a feature idea at Oestlien, and there’s a good chance he’s already considered it. Maybe YouTube’s content rights prevent its implementation—for now at least—or maybe the team is actively working through the tech limitations.
“The version of YouTube TV that I launched was not what I dreamed of launching,” Oestlien said. “But it was what I was able to negotiate and deliver at the time.”
By early 2017, YouTube was ready to show it off.
“There is no question that millennials love great TV content, but what we have seen is they don’t want to watch it in the traditional setting,” Wojcicki said during a February announcement event at the company’s L.A. campus. “They don’t want to watch it with their families sitting in the living room waiting for their favorite show to come on.”
The third reason YouTube couldn’t build their ideal TV app, in addition to partner requirements and technical limitations, was user expectations. People watched TV for decades a certain way, and they weren’t ready to ditch their remotes.
Behind the scenes, the product team was already pivoting.
The user journey
Oestlien didn’t want YouTube’s service to be lumped in with existing cable and satellite bundles. He didn’t even want TV in the name.
One moniker he and designers liked instead? YouTube Air. “But we tested it, and they were like, ‘I’m sorry, YouTube TV—people get it,” Oestlien said.
Oestlien also pushed back against including a traditional channel guide. “This is Google,” he’d tell colleagues. “Google didn’t launch with a directory. Google launched with a little box that says, ‘What are you looking for?’”
Once again, however, would-be customers were clear. They expected a full list of channels, thank you very much.
Internal YouTube TV testers had other notes, too. “We were just getting ripped apart by Googlers,” Oestlien said. “Just people complaining non-stop.”
One of the last things Oestlien held onto was that YouTube TV would launch without a TV app. In his vision, people would simply use their phones to control their TVs when they wanted a big screen.
Team members surveying more than 10,000 people about how they watched TV reported otherwise. They also observed dozens of users in their living rooms to see how they turned on their devices, how much channel-flipping they did, and what pain points remained.
“We became almost cultural anthropologists of TV watchers,” YouTube global head of brand marketing Angela Courtin said.
When YouTube TV debuted, developers were already building an app to run on TVs that would give users just enough sense of familiarity.
“We needed a UI that could be forward-thinking, which was streaming, but also really paid homage to what you were used to,” Courtin said. “What we did with the UI of television made television sexy.”
Before the TV app launched, the service saw churn rates exceed 30% in the months after its debut. “Everyone was trying it and leaving,” Oestlien said. “It was a little bit of a heart attack.”
And on the marketing side, employees were having a tough time coming up with compelling creative. “We weren’t getting traction,” Courtin said. “In focus groups, it wasn’t really resonating, and we hadn’t really gone out wide yet.”
Initially, YouTube TV was designed for YouTube users—primarily young people who went to the internet for entertainment and might not have even owned a television. But convincing them that they should pay a monthly subscription for a set of channels was tough, even if the UI was sexy.
“That summer was the summer we pivoted to, ‘If we’re going to grow this, we need to start actually going after TV viewers,’” Courtin said.
YouTube TV canned its marketing agency. Courtin and a couple other executives got in a room to develop a new campaign. “OK guys, what are we going to do?” they asked themselves. The answer: “We have to basically show that it’s live TV, and it’s easy,” Courtin said. YouTube TV’s biggest ad campaign would essentially be a product walkthrough straight from a support page. But a sexy support page.
Around that time, MLB came to YouTube TV to discuss sponsorship opportunities. Courtin’s superiors were skeptical. YouTube still wasn’t advertising much. And baseball? Was that really where the tech company ought to be?
Courtin pushed. “We were able to negotiate what I consider probably the best deal in the history of television,” Courtin said.
YouTube bought two minutes of consecutive airtime leading into Game 1 of the 2017 World Series, integrating Joe Buck into the spot so it seemed to flow directly from live coverage.
During the game, a YouTube TV ad shined behind home plate, at times making the World Series itself look like a YouTube video. Some found the logo distracting, but Google Search interest in YouTube TV more than doubled. YouTube TV’s national awareness jumped double-digit percentage points, Courtin said. So did the connection fans made between the service and live sports.
“If I could end my career then, I would’ve died on top of a hill,” Courtin said. “It just catapulted us.”
Game on
The first YouTube TV app for TVs launched that same week. By early 2018, it was available on most major TV platforms. YouTube ran similar ad campaigns around the Super Bowl and NBA Finals. In its bid for extant TV viewers, it homed in on wooing sports fans.
Analysts believed YouTube TV lost money on each user in the early days, but as it grew, it would have more leverage to command better rates from content providers. The service would also bolster YouTube’s ad sales efforts.
Leichtman Research Group estimates YouTube TV had about 500,000 subscribers at the end of 2017, when it was still not available in every city (those antenna deals took time). By the end of 2018, that figure had increased to 1.5 million by Leichtman’s estimation, adding roughly 1 million net subscribers each year thereafter, even as cable companies shrank.
Along the way, YouTube TV raised its price to $40/month in 2018, $50 in 2019 and $65 in July 2020. The programming team did its best to bolster YouTube’s channel lineup. In 2020, the service added NFL Network and NFL RedZone, though around the same time it lost 19 regional sports networks. Churn spiked with each cost bump, but many unsubscribers eventually came back.
Developers kept pushing improvements. Software engineer Jason Kimball was shocked when Redditors almost immediately noticed NESN switched from 30 frames-per-second video to 60 fps in 2018. YouTube encouraged its evangelizers, at one point sending golden goat heads in a fan award program.
Commenters were similarly thrilled when YouTube TV introduced “Key Plays,” creating a live-updating highlight reel for viewers looking to see what they’d missed previously in a game presentation. That feature would lead to YouTube TV’s first tech and engineering Emmy award.
By July 2022, YouTube TV announced it had 5 million subscribers. The company was in talks with the NFL, on the way to a $14 billion investment that would shake up sports TV again.
Ticket to ride
Many sports media prognosticators expected NFL Sunday Ticket to move to streaming in 2022 and end DirecTV’s 29-year hold on the out-of-market package. By that point, though, there were many streaming destinations the NFL could have selected.
Apple, Amazon or possibly ESPN’s digital platform were seen as the likeliest picks. YouTube, meanwhile, generally shied away from paying directly for content.
“I thought our odds were extremely low,” Oestlien said.
NFL decision-makers had a different perspective. As the league looked for Sunday Ticket’s next home, executives liked the idea of maintaining what DirecTV offered—a single destination that carried both in-market and out-of-market games, so a fan could buy one product and get all the NFL had to offer. That was YouTube TV. At the same time, YouTube could make Sunday Ticket available to users who wouldn’t need any other equipment or subscription, on a platform basically everyone could access.
“The more time we spent with YouTube, I think the more both sides got excited that this could be a really good fit,” NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder said. “We felt like the more we shared with them about what the product is, how it works, the fan affinity for it and otherwise, we were pretty hopeful and had a lot of confidence that as they saw more, they’d get more excited.”
In the fall of 2022, Oestlien formally presented the pitch to Google leaders, including Pichai. “Some people said it’s like going to court,” Oestlien said. “There’s a lot of work that goes into explaining the financials, explaining the consumer opportunity in particular, and why this is great for YouTube customers.”
Oestlien shared his vision for the product. He answered questions. Then the people in the room took turns, offering their support or not. “I think we had super-majority” approval, he said.
The NFL’s process extended beyond its initial fall timeframe. Early on, the league reportedly asked for more than $2.5 billion annually, and also looked to bundle in other media assets like its NFL RedZone channel. Apple, at one point considered a front-runner, reportedly pushed for additional rights and capabilities, looking for something more like the all-inclusive agreement it would sign with MLS soon thereafter. (The NFL’s handling of its Sunday Ticket rights remains a topic of active litigation).
Several tech companies slowed hiring and/or laid off employees in 2022, making the price of football rights harder to justify. Oestlien and Google stayed committed. By December, the NFL told YouTube it was in pole position, and representatives from both sides spoke multiple times a day.
The NFL announced YouTube as its new partner in a seven-year deal worth a reported $14 billion on Dec. 22, 2022—or early in the morning on Dec. 23 in Australia, where Oestlien was at the time.
“We signed the deal the day before Christmas Eve,” he said, “and if you ask me when I thought we were going to actually get it, it was the day before Christmas Eve.”
After unwrapping the present, everyone involved knew an eight-month sprint awaited upon their return to the office. Others were about to find out.
Teams across YouTube had spent the fourth quarter finalizing their 2023 roadmaps. “Then in January,” Oestlien said, “my team showed up and said, ‘Hey, I know you have a lot of plans for 2023, but we’d love to introduce you as a company to NFL Sunday Ticket.”
It had to ship in August.
Product manager Courtney Lessard managed much of that inter-team process. “I think we launched 129 features for Sunday Ticket,” she said.
YouTube TV borrowed underlying capabilities from other parts of the company, turning to the commerce experts to build the purchase flow, working with the recommendation team to ensure games appeared for fans who had bought access to them, and pulling from the gaming group for an account linking feature that would connect NFL fantasy data to the matchups people watched.
Adding to the challenge: There were few events with the scale of NFL Sundays that could offer proper test environments. In March, the team decided to take advantage of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to roll out multiview capabilities for a select group of users, allowing them to watch up to four games at once, even if the feature wasn’t fully baked.
“I was getting very panicked texts from our engineering teams and from our support teams, because the inbound volume around YouTube TV … was actually crashing our systems on the support side,” Oestlien said. “I thought something was wrong with our experiment. What it turned out is somebody had figured out that you could call our customer support directly and they would opt you into the experiment, and then they had gone on Reddit and let everybody know.”
Not everything could be done by Week 1 of the NFL season. For instance, the ability to re-watch key plays in-stream launched on TVs, while mobile and tablet access to that feature would have to wait a season.
Investment analysts were initially skeptical about YouTube’s first massive sports buy.
“We have a hard time understanding why a company like Alphabet, who has assiduously avoided premium sports rights, decided that Sunday Ticket was where they wanted to start the sports build-out from,” MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson wrote at the time.
When DirecTV’s chief content officer Rob Thun was asked if his company missed the package, he responded, “Do you like losing a billion dollars a year?”
Then he corrected himself.
“That was the old deal,” he said. “The new deal, it’d be a billion and a half.”
NFL Sunday Ticket surpassed 2 million subscribers midway through the 2025 season, according to Antenna data, up 37% over the prior year. At a max price of $480/season, that would amount to roughly $1 billion in annual revenue, still far less than the rights fee.
But Sunday Ticket brought additional value, starting with an increase in bundle subscribers. YouTube TV leapt from 6 million subs at the end of 2022 to more than 9 million two years later, according to Leichtman.
“There was an effect on the marketplace at large when they did the (Sunday Ticket) deal to show, OK, this isn’t a flirtation,” NBCUniversal president for platform distribution and partnerships Matt Schnaars said. “For anybody who was maybe still doubting whether they were serious with the business, that changed any last doubts.”
Sunday Ticket would also get more people to use the YouTube app on their TV, offering valuable advertising opportunities. According to Nielsen, YouTube’s share of total TV viewing time has grown from 6% in 2022 to a record 14% in May of this year.
Along the way, TVs passed phones and desktops as the most common devices for YouTube viewing in the U.S. Sunday Ticket now anchors a primetime channel store that also sells services such as HBO Max and Paramount+.
All those new users provided YouTube with additional leverage in its conversations with content providers last year, as it went about renewing—and expanding—its partnerships.
Getting unlimited
In negotiations with TV channel operators, YouTube executives have always leaned on user studies to back up requests in negotiations.
“We come in with a very principled perspective that we’re fairly insistent on,” Oestlien said. “We spend a lot of time with partners actually trying to walk them through the data to show them that it’s not arbitrary.”
With the launch of multiview, for instance, YouTube TV showed its partners data reflecting increased engagement rather than divided viewer attention. In 2025, YouTube TV reminded networks, people have subscription fatigue, and fragmentation is keeping fans from watching games.
YouTube also hired Justin Connolly as its first global head of media and sports in 2025, bringing over someone with experience negotiating carriage deals at Disney (and triggering a breach of contract lawsuit from the Mouse House, which the companies ultimately settled).
In February 2025, YouTube TV announced a renewal with Paramount. In July, it signed a renewal with NBCUniversal. August brought a new tie-up with Fox. Finally, in November, YouTube and Disney agreed on updated terms, after ESPN went dark on the service for two weeks.
In each set of talks, YouTube pushed for the ability to create new lineup bundles at different price points, leading to the launch of lower-priced plans, including one built for sports fans that rolled out earlier this year.
YouTube also wanted network partners to offer their related streaming services directly through YouTube, part of an ongoing competition with Amazon to serve as a hub for more entertainment. Fox One launched ahead of the World Cup, for instance.
Last but not least, YouTube wanted to pull streaming-exclusive content into its TV service.
“The view to the partner is, ‘Hey, we’re a one-stop shop to help you monetize your content better than anybody else,'” Connolly said.
The dream of a true all-in-one sports destination remains elusive. It’s unlikely Amazon, Netflix and YouTube would all let a single app ingest and distribute their content.
But this year, NBC revived its NBC Sports channel to distribute games otherwise available on Peacock to TV subscribers. And as of today, much of ESPN’s streaming content—which in its entirety includes 47,000 live events per year—will be viewable within YouTube TV.
That requires breaking out of the paradigm of a list of TV channels, which Oestlien has been attempting for a decade. This weekend, YouTube TV will be streaming more than 600 live events. In the channel guide, a shelf of recommended ESPN events will take up one row. The ESPN page within YouTube TV’s app will show all the network’s games, not just whatever’s playing on the ESPN channel at that time.
In October 2025, Oestlien was promoted to oversee all subscription products across YouTube and YouTube TV, as those platforms move closer together. To him, there’s no reason a fan should have to hunt around when a game ends to watch their favorite podcast break down said action, as an example. Except for the labyrinth of rights negotiations and technical hurdles and user expectations that have prevented, for a time, every other aspect of the YouTube TV experience over the last decade.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan highlighted YouTube TV’s ongoing reinvention in a statement to Sportico. “Our subscription business continues to see strong, sustained momentum, and the credit goes to the team’s relentless focus on combining the best live content with an unparalleled product experience,” he said.
Ajay Arora was hired this year as VP of product management, overseeing TV and sports experiences at YouTube, including YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket. He comes with experience across streaming services, from Audible to Netflix to Disney.
“At the end of the day, if you put yourself in a consumer’s mindset, they choose to be entertained,” Arora said. “How do we make it so you want to be entertained by us?”
YouTube TV’s biggest missing piece for most sports fans, beyond content on Amazon and Netflix, is local games. YouTube is reportedly a frontrunner to land a collection of NBA teams’ in-market rights, with other leagues also charting new media strategies after the collapse of regional sports networks around the country. If YouTube wants to present an all-in-one sports streaming destination, it might have to buy more of the rights itself. It’s unclear whether those games would be packaged into YouTube TV or sold as a separate subscription.
At YouTube, Connolly said, “nothing is ever complete.”
To get to today’s YouTube TV—and whatever the service will look like tomorrow—the company needed to prove its worth to network operators, which required viewers, which it got through Sunday Ticket, which only happened after convincing both the NFL and Google leadership about the project’s worthiness, which necessitated years of product growth, which was only possible if Google’s engineers committed to the gig, encouraged by a product leader who was backed by a CEO eager to figure out what to do with TV.
Oh, and they would need an antenna.
Oestlien was recently looking up at the roof of the office building where that receiver once stood. It’s long gone, he said, likely lost in one of the company’s many renovations.
But YouTube TV appears here to stay, as long as it keeps changing.
