Millions of football fans now have a reason to not ditch DirecTV. After months of negotiations, the satellite service has finally renewed its deal to be the exclusive carrier for NFL Sunday Ticket.

DirecTV has been the sole pay-TV source for Sunday Ticket, which shows all Sunday afternoon out-of-market football games… for the price of several hundred dollars a year per subscriber.

Neither the NFL nor DirecTV is saying exactly how much the new deal is worth, but ESPN’s Darren Rovell reports that it will cost the satellite company about $1.5/year for the next eight years.

If true, that’s more than DirecTV earns from the fees it charges to Sunday Ticket subscribers, but the company knows that many of these customers might consider switching switch to cable — or simply drop pay-TV service altogether — if it weren’t for being able to see their favorite teams play each week.

Additionally, the exclusivity deal allows DirecTV to continue selling online-only versions of Sunday Ticket to non-satellite customers. AT&T has already expressed interest in packaging a wireless version to its customers, though it’s unclear if that would conflict with the deal between NFL and Verizon Wireless that allows for live-streaming of in-market games.

This is why Sunday Ticket has been such a key piece of DirecTV’s pending merger with AT&T. If the negotiations had failed, AT&T would have been able to walk away from the acquisition.

After all, DirecTV customers who want high-speed broadband service generally get it a cable TV company. If a cable customer drops her pay-TV service, she’ll still be paying for Internet. If a satellite customer gets rid of his TV package, that’s the end of their financial relationship.

The goal of the AT&T merger is to ultimately bring some sort of broadband solution to DirecTV customers that doesn’t come from a third party. AT&T says it has the technology to deploy a relatively high-speed wireless broadband service to rural areas, but has yet to reveal details on price, availability or timing.

With the country’s most-watched sport locked in as an exclusive for the better part of a decade, DirecTV is likely to maintain a healthy number of subscribers, giving AT&T time to deploy a wireless broadband offering and to hopefully continue building out its new gigabit fiber service.

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