Among the many offseason changes being made around the league, the way fans watch NFL Redzone will be slightly different.
For years, Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans were subjected to only regional games on NFL Sundays. That all changed back in the 1990s when NFL Sunday Ticket allowed fans to watch games outside of their local market and expand their viewing experience.
It was a method further revolutionized by NFL Redzone, which took that concept of being able to watch all of the games on a Sunday and took it literally. Scott Hanson gives us “seven hours of commercial-free football” each week, allowing us to mainline every single game at once while cutting out the moments that drag the action down.
It’s not a traditionalist way to watch the game; it’s essentially gridiron Goodfellas where the action whips around from city-to-city to give us the high-octane moments from each game as they happen.
Things are changing, though, as the NFL broadcasting rights are shifting a bit and with it is how we will watch Redzone on Sundays. Beginning next season DirecTV will no longer be the home of NFL Sunday Ticket and the league announced this week at the Owner’s Meeting that NFL Redzone will be undergoing a change as well.
Only one NFL Redzone Channel will exist for 2023 season
Before anyone freaks out, NFL Redzone is not going away — technically. As of last season there were two channels that carried everyone’s favorite seven hours of commercial-free football but that’s going to be changing next year.
The NFL announced that the DirecTV version of NFL Redzone has been shuttered and, like Highlander, there will only be one.
“NFL confirms that moving forward there will now only be one NFL Redzone channel. That’s with Scott Hanson hosting,” it was reported on Tuesday. “DirectTV’s deal came to an end and that version of Redzone no longer exists.”
For some, this was when they learned that there were two different versions of NFL Redzone as the one hosted Scott Hanson has grown into the more popular of the two, but the one hosted by Andrew Siciliano existed first.
The original RedZone Channel was launched back in 2005 and revolutionized the way we consume football on Sundays. It provided the first all-encompassing look at the games happening at once and offered fans a chance to catch all of the action rather than being stuck on just a single game.
At the end of Week 18, Siciliano gave a sign-off that seemed to indicate that everyone knew the end had arrived.
A final sign-off for @AndrewSiciliano and DirecTV’s Red Zone channel. pic.twitter.com/Xz2su2iIMj
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 9, 2023
Notice the not-so-subtle claim of being the “original RedZone”, which is completely legitimate. Now that YouTube TV will be the home of NFL Sunday Ticket, the Scott Hanson version of Redzone will be the only one produced — likely because it’s the one produced by NFL Network.
It’s a small but significant change serving as yet another signal that the NFL is entering a new era of broadcasting its games and bringing them to an audience.