NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV will present a familiar issue for bettors who rely on streaming

Pricing packages for the NFL Sunday Ticket in its first year since moving to YouTube TV were revealed Tuesday and left fans floored at how expensive they are.

But while many people will reluctantly pay the price to get a live stream of every NFL game outside of their home markets in 2023, one segment of NFL fans have an added reason to be critical of the cost: Bettors.

League streaming offerings like the Sunday Ticket make it easy for bettors watch the games they have action on, but they don’t necessarily improve the ability to bet during games. In fact, they place bettors at a disadvantage due to the latency between live action and streams.

According to a graphic shared by Sharp Football Analysis’ Warren Sharp, from video streaming solutions provider Phenix, YouTube TV streams of this year’s Super Bowl came in 54 seconds behind real-time action. Other streaming providers were in the same ballpark of a minute of lag time.

This type of latency is common across different leagues and providers and incentivizes bettors who can’t attend games to stick to traditional coaxial cable connections for live-betting purposes.

YouTube TV was 54 seconds behind real-time for the last Super Bowl

not sure the delay for a regular Sunday afternoon during next NFL season with Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV but likely more than it was with DirecTV (with dish, latency of ~ 24-30 seconds) pic.twitter.com/gCGONS21Sn

— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) April 11, 2023

“Generally speaking, [coaxial] is the fastest way to get the most live feed to your TV of anything that you’re watching,” inplayLIVE CEO Andrew Pace said in an episode of Behind The Lines, where he did a demonstration of how bad the latency is between different streams. “Whereas using the internet, the technology exists to actually get it faster than a coaxial cable, but that isn’t what is being delivered to us.”

Betting during games and so-called microbetting are some of the fastest growing markets in sports betting. However, sportsbooks get near-live information fed to them from league partners, keeping their lines and odds ahead of anyone who isn’t also catching the information live.

For instance: Imagine a bettor sees incredible odds for a team that has the ball on the goal-line to score the next touchdown, that would seem like a no-brainer bet. But the bettor doesn’t realize their stream is a minute behind, and the team they think has the ball actually fumbles on the next possession.

This is a major disadvantage and makes streaming not worth the cost for the purposes of betting. Not until better technology is provided.

Of course, bettors may still want to pony up the cash for services like Sunday Ticket or MLB.TV just for a wider range of games to watch. But it should be strictly for entertainment purposes until leagues and service providers figure out a way to give them streams closer to live.