Restaurants with NFL Sunday Ticket through DirecTV will have to switch to EverPass. | Photo: Shutterstock
A big change is coming for restaurants that rely on football games to drive traffic on fall and winter Sundays.
Starting with this upcoming season, restaurants and bars that have been using NFL Sunday Ticket to screen non-local games will have to sign up with the streaming service EverPass to continue doing that. As of this year, EverPass is the exclusive provider of NFL Sunday Ticket for businesses, taking over from DirecTV, a satellite service.
For many bars and restaurants, that will mean switching away from or adding to their satellite TV systems over the next few months, a prospect that is raising concerns for some operators and industry advocates due to the costs and complications involved.
“What a lot of restaurants are realizing is that they have a big decision to make about the future of what they do for broadcasting NFL games on a Sunday,” said Sean Kennedy, chief advocacy officer for the National Restaurant Association. “It’s a big technical change and it’s a big financial change. And for those restaurants that are relying on NFL traffic to drive revenue, this can put them in a world of hurt.”
The association is calling for a pause on the transition to EverPass, at least for this upcoming season, in order to give restaurants more time to plan and figure out the technology. It has not engaged with EverPass directly, but it has shared its concerns with Congress, which held a hearing last week on the sports broadcast landscape.
“If Congress wants to [ask the NFL for a pause], they can do that. If EverPass wants to reach that conclusion, they can reach it,” Kennedy said. “We’re not calling for new regulations to be put on anybody, but we are simply saying that the status quo right now is untenable for a number of restaurant operators.”
EverPass was formed in 2023 by the NFL and RedBird Capital Partners, a private-equity firm. That same year, it won the rights to distribute NFL Sunday Ticket commercially. DirecTV held the rights to the package since it was created in 1994 by restaurateur Jon Taffer, who brought the idea to the NFL.
Besides NFL Sunday Ticket, EverPass also offers access to Premier League, college football, NHL games, and other sports content. Several thousand venues, including restaurants, bars, and casinos, are using it today.
For the past three years, EverPass has allowed DirecTV to continue distributing NFL Sunday Ticket alongside EverPass. But according to EverPass, negotiations to extend that agreement fell through, leaving it as the sole authorized source of NFL Sunday Ticket for the 2026 season, which starts Sept. 9.
EverPass said that when talks with DirecTV failed, it immediately took action to start prepping businesses for the switch.
“We understand how much NFL Sunday Ticket matters to the guest experience at commercial venues,” EverPass CMO Bryan Icenhower said in a statement. “We are focused on providing businesses of all sizes with technological support and pricing incentives to prepare for the upcoming season and establish a long-term solution for the streaming-first distribution environment.”
The price of EverPass varies based on the size of the restaurant and the package they choose. Operators will have to purchase an EverPass streaming device (or devices, depending on their needs) or a Spectrum Xumo streaming box, which is EverPass-compatible.
They will also need enough internet bandwidth to support streaming. The minimum is 10 Mbps per device, and according to EverPass’ website, “most bars and restaurants already have adequate bandwidth.”
Still, for some operators, the transition is daunting. Jim Hallers owns the Tailgators and Citizens Grill sports bars in the Houston area. They serve hundreds of customers on football Sundays, and have long used NFL Sunday Ticket to screen games on dozens of televisions at each location.
During the Congressional hearing last week, Hallers testified that adding streaming will require him to purchase not only the EverPass devices but also faster internet, switching equipment and other infrastructure to support the new system. He estimated it would cost him as much as $30,000 to $40,000 per location.
“You have to bring in eight of these boxes, and then you have to put in the wiring and the infrastructure to distribute that signal out to all of your 30 or 40 TVs,” he said. “This is because your typical internet bandwidth at a bar can’t handle 30 or 40 streams.
“It’s just mayhem.”
And yet some say it could become the new normal for bars and restaurants as televised sports continue to shift from linear TV to streaming.
For instance, Thursday Night Football games are now available only on Amazon Prime, and some holiday NFL games are shown exclusively on Netflix outside of their local markets. Fox News calculated that it would have cost the average person $575 to $800 to access every NFL game last year. And that’s not to mention the other major sports leagues.
“It’s a very fragmented world in terms of how customers and small business restaurants receive sports broadcasting,” Kennedy said. “It’s over the air, it’s cable, it’s satellite, and now we’re moving into this new world of streaming and then different streaming providers. And this can be both overwhelming and anti-competitive for the restaurant industry.”
The association is one of a number of advocacy groups asking Congress to re-examine the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which gave sports leagues an exemption from antitrust law to sell their TV rights as a package, rather than have each team negotiate its own deal.
The idea was to ensure that fans would be able to easily view games on TV. But that’s no longer the case as the leagues sell more games to paid streaming services.
“The Sports Broadcasting Act was designed to facilitate the distribution of games through free, over-the-air television,” said U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) during the hearing. “It was not intended to provide a perpetual shield for leagues to coordinate the sale of media rights across every new technology and distribution platform that emerges.”
The FCC is also looking into the sports broadcasting market, and there are several pieces of legislation aimed at regulating local blackouts and other streaming practices at the state and federal level.
EverPass, for its part, says its goal is to help businesses ease streaming headaches by bundling platforms together. In addition to NFL Sunday Ticket, operators can access streaming sports offerings from platforms such as Prime Video, Apple TV, and Peacock, depending on their subscription.
“With the expansion of premium live sports on streaming-exclusive platforms, EverPass is specifically designed to aggregate and simplify content distribution for operators,” Icenhower said. “We are working directly with venues every day, providing promotional discounts, onboarding resources, flexible payment options and technical support to navigate this transition now and over the long-term.”
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