What do you say? THIS for the “Great Renewal”?
On Wednesday morning, YouTube TV announced that it would introduce a sports-specific cable packageallowing consumers to reduce cable costs while still receiving the sports programming at the heart of those packages.
According to YouTube, the new package will be offered to customers at a lower cost than the company’s current “base plan” price of $82.99 — though the exact price has not been disclosed. The sports package will debut in “early 2026” and provide access to broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) AND cable networks featuring sports programming (ESPN, Fox Sports, NBC Sports Network and USA Sports/Golf Channel).
The new sports package will be part of plans to bring 10″genre-specific packages” for consumers in the new year. The sports package comes after years of sports fans supporting such an effort — and years of complaints from consumers who thought they were paying for cable channels they didn’t consume.
The announcement follows a sharp decline for YouTube TV that saw the cable provider lose a handful of NFL and college football games — and a chunk of its business — in a long time.chariot war” with ESPN and Disney. In the wake of that battle, YouTube TV pledged to work to regain customer trust, and the genre-specific packages appear to be the first effort toward those goals.
The economics of cable television have long made a specific sports “package” a difficult proposition. Sports networks like ESPN cost cable providers like YouTube TV a fortune (nearly $10 a month, per customer, according to the most recent estimates), and ESPN’s owners at Disney have been keen to ensure that cable providers include all of them Disney’s programming under one package, making it difficult for providers to use smaller, genre-specific chunks of programming.
In many ways, however, the rigidity of the traditional cable structure contributed to the format’s decline, as ever-growing audiences continued to “cut the cord” in favor of piecemeal sports-specific solutions that proved cheaper than a traditional cable bill.
For golf fans, the new YouTube TV package offers a license to golf programming, offering coverage of LIV Golf, the PGA Tour and each of the major championships under agreements with NBC, CBS, ESPN, Golf Channel, USA and Fox.
For those TV customers who are “single-issue” viewers – in other words, those who only watch sports programs – the news is good: the same access to TV will be available in the coming months … and it will cost you less to watch it.
