NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers weren’t shown the first 10 minutes of the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers’ highly anticipated Week 5 matchup. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio discussed his experience with the platform on his show Monday morning. Skip to 2:05 in this clip from NFL on NBC’s YouTube channel to hear him directly.
NFL Sunday Ticket is a subscription-based service that is marketed as allowing its users to watch every regular-season game during the two Sunday time windows — 1 p.m. and 4:25 p.m. ET — that are not broadcast locally in their market. If you’re a Seahawks fan outside Seattle, this is the only official way to watch their games live unless they’re played in prime time.
Florio mentions that he opened his Sunday Ticket
DVR to watch the Seahawks-49ers game ahead of the show, and was astounded to see that the recording began with 4:47 left in the first quarter.
“Where’s the rest of it?” he exclaimed.
“This is 2026, the last I checked. We’ve got superintelligence. There has to be a way to lift the blackout so that people who have paid their $400 because they have no choice but to pay for the whole season to watch all the games that aren’t on in their market — if there’s a game that’s happening that’s not on, wait for it, in their market, they should be able to watch the first 10-plus minutes of the first quarter on Sunday Ticket.
“I know the NFL’s got plenty of stuff going on as it relates to antitrust challenges directed at Sunday Ticket, [but] this is another one just waiting to happen.
“I pay my $400. Why can’t I watch the first 10 minutes of Seahawks-49ers? We don’t know what’s going to happen in those first 10 minutes. It could’ve been the greatest first 10 minutes of a game in NFL history and you never get to see it. It’s inexplicable that this would happen.”
When FOX’s or CBS’s “bonus coverage” of the first window bleeds into the time frame of the second one, subscribers miss the beginning of the game in the second window. Any portion of the 4:25 p.m. ET game that airs before the first window finishes is unavailable on Sunday Ticket, even after the fact.
Therefore, anyone not in Seattle’s or San Francisco’s market who were getting the Detroit Lions vs. Arizona Cardinals as the scheduled 4:25 p.m. ET game had no way to watch the Seahawks-49ers game until the “bonus coverage” of overtime in the New York Giants vs. Washington Commanders game ended.
In his Monday article on NBC Sports, Florio argued that fans who pay for every available service to watch the full games should be offered a way to do so. He finished by pointing to the legal issues raised when a package offered as the only way to watch every game doesn’t provide full coverage.
This article originally appeared on Seahawks Wire: NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers missed 10 minutes of Seahawks-49ers
