I am having this fight elsewhere.
DirecTV pays the NFL $700 million a year for this exclusive. There are about 2.5 million subscribers to Sunday Ticket, and that may be a bit generous.
If the package is no longer exclusive to DirecTV, then the NFL will not receive $700 million a year from DirecTV. As a matter of fact, the NFL would most likely not receive anywhere near that amount from DirecTV.
The Sunday Ticket package is available because of "containment". The NFL does not want to risk the CBS and FOX packages by all of a sudden doubling the subscriber rate to Sunday Ticket. Remember, the more people that have Sunday Ticket, the less people will watch the games available on their local channels only.
Remember that Dish Network and Comcast, as well as practically every other cable company, do not wish to pay the NFL for this exclusive. They would rather have Sunday Ticket on the same terms that those companies receive NHL Center Ice, NBA League Pass and MLB Extra Innings.
The leagues for the latter three packages are the ones that set the price. There is no bidding war between Comcast and Dish Network for Center Ice, because the NHL sets the price for the package to the end user. In that scenario, the NHL receives half of the revenue for each package sold.
So, with my examples so far, let's do the math if Sunday Ticket were available to everyone, and the subscriber base doubles:
5 million subscribers
$249 per subscriber
equals $1.245 billion
Split that between the NFL and the other carriers, and the NFL receives $622 million. And that if there are 5 million subscribers, as there might not be.
However, if there are 5 million subscribers, realize a subscription base of that size impacts the CBS and FOX contracts, especially the regional coverage. When some of the Sunday afternoon games are only pulling between 15 to 19 million subscribers, an increase of 2.5 million Sunday Ticket subscriptions can pull those numbers down. Even more so on the regional coverage, because I guarantee you the Redskins will not be on my television in the near future.