Want YouTube TV & Sunday Ticket? Don’t Sign Up Through A Mobile Carrier Or Internet Provider

If you want to sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket and ideally through YouTube TV then you will want to avoid signing up to the live TV service through a third party, including your mobile carrier and internet provider.

While there is no cost difference in how you sign up to YouTube TV, the convenience of signing up through a third-party service can come at a feature cost, such as access to Sunday Ticket.

One of the main requirements of signing up to Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV is that you are also signed up to YouTube TV’s base package. Likewise, even though you will pay for the whole season immediately, and up front, you must retain access to the base package throughout the season to retain access to Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV.

Considering YouTube TV doesn’t offer refunds, understanding some of these limitations before signing up can be important in avoiding issues later on down the road.

YouTube TV’s third-party Sunday Ticket problem

The problem with third-party services, including mobile carriers and internet providers like Verizon and Frontier, is that they manage your YouTube TV subscription for you. That is, the subscription is with the other company and not YouTube itself. Instead, these users are integrated users.

At present, it is largely impossible to add Sunday Ticket to an integrated user’s subscription – one that’s managed by a third-party service. Anyone who is already signed up through their mobile carrier or internet provider may have already noticed that there is no option to add Sunday Ticket to their plan, and that’s the point. There is no Sunday Ticket add-on to add to an integrated user’s account at the moment.

The only way for those subscribers to add Sunday Ticket would be to cancel their existing subscription through the third-party service and then sign up directly through YouTube TV.

It is also worth noting that this is more to do with third-party billing than any third-party service in itself. In other words, there are likely to be other billing examples which make it impossible to add Sunday Ticket to YouTube TV.

As an example, Streaming Better can confirm that Google Play Billing currently doesn’t support Sunday Ticket billing through YouTube TV either.

You can sign up to Sunday Ticket without YouTube TV

Google is offering Sunday Ticket through both YouTube TV and YouTube (as a Primetime Channel), and this makes it possible to sign up to Sunday Ticket without a live TV package.

This also means it is possible to sign up to Sunday Ticket even if subscribed to YouTube TV through a third party – although you won’t be signing up to Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV.

The other point to note about going the standard YouTube route is that it does work out to be more expensive. Whether signing up with or without NFL RedZone, NFL Sunday Ticket costs $100 more as a Primetime Channel than it does when signing up through YouTube TV.

The decision to offer Sunday Ticket via both YouTube and YouTube TV seems partly designed to ensure that it is always possible to sign up regardless of a home’s existing subscription setup, and that includes issues as a YouTube TV subscriber.

Of course, Sunday Ticket is a new addition and it is likely that YouTube TV will flesh out support more as time goes on. In the meantime, it is just important to keep in mind that having access to YouTube TV doesn’t automatically mean you can add Sunday Ticket to your live TV package.