Report: NFL throws flag on Apple’s request for expanded Sunday Ticket deal

As Apple’s bid for NFL Sunday Ticket rights appears to be yards away from the end zone, the league is throwing a flag on the tech giant’s play to expand those carriage rights.

In an update Friday, CNBC’s Alex Sherman cites “people familiar with the matter” to report that negotiations have slowed over Apple’s desire to get a deal broader than the existing arrangement with DirecTV, which expires at the end of the 2022-2023 season.

Sherman writes that Apple has been seeking the option of carrying local games and offering Sunday Ticket in markets outside the U.S. That would follow the pattern Apple set when it secured complete rights to Major League Soccer earlier this year and line up with Apple’s desire to offer a service free of viewing-restrictions asterisks.

But adding local games would conflict with broadcast-carriage contracts the NFL inked last year. It would also break with the precedent of the current $1.5 billion/year Sunday Ticket arrangement with DirecTV, which only covers the U.S. and only provides out-of-market games to DirecTV’s satellite and streaming viewers.

Early this year, Amazon (which already carries Thursday-night NFL games) and Apple looked to be the most likely successors, but reports have increasingly suggested that Apple will come away with the next Sunday Ticket deal.

As talks between the NFL and Apple start to look like a game of inches, streaming Sunday Ticket subscribers seem increasingly anxious for new stewardship of that package. Viewers have griped multiple weeks in a row about such glitches as games not loading at all or halting in mid-play with inscrutable error messages.