The error message seen on August 17, 2025, alerting NFL fans to what they already knew — games weren’t streaming well.Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends
The good news is we — by which I mean Google, YouTube, andYouTube TV— made it halfway through the season without any real sort of major technical hiccup as the exclusive home ofNFL Sunday Ticket. But on October 29, in the thick of Week 8 (out of 17),problems did arise.
It was apparent fairly early into Sunday’s 1 p.m. games that something was amiss. Buffering problems abounded. Lag was a real thing. Resolution and bitrate dropped to unacceptable levels. And Google, for its part, noted the issueson social media, as well ason a help page. “If you’re experiencing buffering issues on YouTube our team is aware and working on a fix,” the statement said on Twitter. “YouTube TV or NFL Sunday Ticket may also be impacted. We’ll follow up here once this has been resolved.”
And it’s worth noting that it doesn’t appear that Google is actually required to do anything. A quick trip through the NFL Sunday Ticketterms and conditionspretty much spells out that you pay for the service, and that’s that. No clauses for compensation for an outage. “Payments for NFL Sunday Ticket subscriptions are non-refundable, in whole and/or in part,” it reads. “Once your payment method has been charged for a season, you will not be able to get a refund for that season.”
Google should offer an apology at the very least. Streaming problems will, unfortunately, happen on occasion. Even if compensation isn’t in order, an explanation certainly is. We’ve reached out to Google to see if there’s any word on what happened, and if any compensation is coming.
