It makes sense for DirecTV, which pays about $1 billion annually for the exclusive deal with the NFL, to get more creative with how it uses those rights to its advantage by making the sport content more widely accessible. With American football being the most popular sport in the US, and the possibility of the NBA season being delayed or cancelled altogether, the satellite operator believes the package is crucial to luring new subscribers and reducing churn. The second largest US pay TV operator posted the smallest quarterly subscriber gain in its history adding only 26,000 net new subscribers in Q2 2011, down from 100,000 during the same period in 2010.

While other pay-TV providers have focused on aggregating content to TV everywhere initiatives, DirecTV seems to be at least as interested in pushing to extend the NFL package beyond its set-top boxes in the search for new revenue sources - indeed the Sony deal should generate some incremental revenue for DIRECTV. In this respect DirecTV is beginning to learn the lessons from the distribution strategy already deployed by a number of the major US sport leagues and ESPN who are expanding their digital offerings to the connected living room through devices like the PS3, Xbox 360, connected TVs and dedicated over-the-top STBs like Roku and Apple TV at an increasing rate, in a bid to increase the appeal of their subscription offers.

The PS3 currently offers content from the MLB, with the MLB.tv package costing $120 per season, and the NHL, through the NHL GameCenter app that costs $169 per season (plus an additional $10 for non Playstation Plus subscribers). Meanwhile, Microsoft's Xbox 360 offers exclusive live sports programming through an existing relationship with ESPN for their broadband network ESPN3 and the UFC that will launch later this year. But, many of these league-offered packages are for 'out of market' games only which means that the local team matches are subject to a live blackout which is imposed to preserve the value of existing pay TV distribution deals. This means that, as things stand, even if the NBA's League Pass were to show up on the PS3 it is unlikely that the console could replace the pay TV set top box for most live sports fans.

However, many of the league-owned cable networks have been locked into non-basic tiers of the pay TV operators' packages and consequently have not achieved the sort of wide coverage enjoyed by ESPN, Fox Sports and Comcast's regional sports networks. Over the long term this sort of operator pushback is likely to increase the appeal of an OTT proposition that brings gives leagues the prospect of high per-subscriber fees (live sport has been one of the few things that consumers have traditionally had a high willingness to pay for online).