I'm curious what the optimal PPV price is for the NFL. I'd easily pay $10-15 PPV, any game. For now, they seem to actively make their product impossible to consume for fans of non-local teams.
Maybe more consumers would buy access to games if they could buy them individually, so you'd end up with 4x the number of current Sunday Ticket subscribers buying at least 5 games a year. But that seems like a lot. Eventually you run out of sufficiently motivated out-of-market fans. Remember that the teams with big out-of-market fan bases are just the teams that get picked routinely for national coverage. I could easily see 6-8 Dallas Cowboys or Green Bay Packers games/year for free already.
But the reason why this isn't profitable for the NFL is the billion dollars per year that DirecTV pays them to be exclusive. There probably wouldn't be enough of an increase in viewership to cover that. The $300 DirecTV charges customers is actually selling it at a loss considering how much they pay the NFL. Their bet is that they can make up the difference in $60-$100 per month subscription fees.
However, market research demonstrated that there was strong consumer resistance for the concept of paying to watch one's "local" team, and the market for PPV out-of-market teams was not deemed large enough.
(to the cite-your-source pedants: there is a book that says these things, I read it once, but I do not guarantee that my recall is 100% accurate, nor do I remember title of said book.)
What about NFL Sunday Ticket?