[dpifke]

$350/year for Sunday Ticket with YouTube TV included vs. $450/year for just Sunday Ticket, delivered via regular YouTube it seems.

YouTube TV is required—not included—with the $350/year plan.

So it's either $350/year + $73/month (with), or $450/year (without).

Assuming you only keep YouTube TV for the September-January football season, that's $715/season with YouTube TV, vs. $450/season without. If you don't get any value from YouTube TV (e.g. if you already have cable or satellite), it's cheaper without.

(Sunday Ticket doesn't show locally or nationally broadcast games such as Monday Night Football, so you kinda need access to broadcast TV alongside it.)

When DirecTV had the Sunday Ticket monopoly, you had to sign a two-year contract to be allowed to purchase it. At least with Google, you can cancel YouTube TV as soon as the season is over.

In my family's case, we weighed the cost against what we spent last football season on food + drinks at sports bars, and decided it was a better deal. ($715 over 18 weeks = $40/weekend. If we go out half as frequently, we come out ahead.)

[poulsbohemian]

I agree with your math, but the whole thing is offensive and abusive no matter how you cut it. $450/year (minimum) just to get football games. We've been evaluating our different options overall, given that Netflix price-to-value continues to weaken, as does Sling and Hulu, but I can't find any reason apart from NFL games why I would subscribe to YouTubeTv.

[dpifke]

If you don't care what games you watch, an HD antenna isn't a bad deal.

Unfortunately, where we're located (South Dakota), there isn't a "local" team, so it's pretty random which games are broadcast by our local affiliates. If we want to follow a team and watch games we care about, it's either go out to a sports bar, or get Sunday Ticket at home. (And as discussed above, the latter is actually cheaper than the former.)

With other streaming services, we mostly stick to a "one at a time" policy. We'll subscribe to e.g. HBO Max for a month, catch up on the latest season of a show, and then cancel as soon as we're done.

I watch at most a couple of hours of TV a week, but my partner likes having "junk TV" on in the background while she's doing other stuff, so we do get some value from YouTube TV for cooking shows, shows like Deadliest Catch, etc. I wouldn't want to go back to paying $150/month for cable for that, but it's not completely worthless.

Compared to travel or my expensive tool habit, TV and football is actually a pretty small portion of our overall entertainment budget.