How about this for the “Great Rebundling”?
On Wednesday morning, YouTube TV announced that it would introduce a sports-specific cable package, allowing consumers to cut back on cable costs while still receiving the sports programming at the center of those packages.
According to YouTube, the new package will be offered to customers at a cost below the company’s current “base plan” price of $82.99 — though the exact price has not been disclosed. The sports package will be debuted in “early 2026,” and will provide access to broadcast channels (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and cable networks showcasing sports programming (ESPN networks, Fox Sports, NBC Sports Network, and USA Sports/Golf Channel).
The new sports bundle will be part of plans to bring 10 “genre-specific packages” to consumers in the new year. The sports bundle comes after years of crowing from sports fans in support of such an endeavor — and follows years of complaints from consumers who felt they were paying for cable channels they did not consume.
The announcement follows a bruising fall for YouTube TV that saw the cable provider lose a handful of NFL and college football games — and a chunk of its business — to a protracted “carriage fight” with ESPN and Disney. At the conclusion of that battle, YouTube TV vowed to work to win back customer trust, and the genre-specific packages appear to be the first effort to those ends.
The economics of cable TV have long made a sports-specific “bundle” a difficult proposition. Sports networks like ESPN cost a fortune for cable providers like YouTube TV (nearly $10 per month, per customer, according to the most recent estimates) and ESPN’s owners at Disney have been keen to ensure that cable providers include all Disney programming under one package, making it hard for providers to siphon off smaller, genre-specific portions of programming.
In many ways, however, the rigidity of the traditional cable structure contributed to the format’s decline, as larger and larger audiences continued to “cut the cord” in favor of sports-specific, piecemeal solutions that proved cheaper than a traditional cable bill.
For golf fans, the new YouTube TV bundle offers an all-access pass to golf programming, providing coverage of LIV Golf, the PGA Tour, and each of the major championships under agreements with NBC, CBS, ESPN, Golf Channel, USA, and Fox.
For those TV customers who are “single-issue” viewers — in other words, those who watch only sports programming — the news is good: The same TV access will be available in the next few months… and it’ll cost less for you to watch.
