In his newsletter, he mentioned that both NBC & CBS put in bids to steal UFC from Fox (who still have their offer at $225-250m per) & that is the delay in announcing the rumored Fox deal.
But Fox is still supposedly the heavy favorite.
Regarding ESPN+:
The new shows will be called UFC on ESPN+ Fight Night.
In addition, ESPN+ subscribers will get other original content from UFC, access to UFC’s full archive of programming as well as Countdown shows, press conferences and weigh-ins.
Even though there is some overlap in content, UFC will be keeping Fight Pass. The plan for 2019 is still to produce five or six Fight Pass exclusive shows and original UFC content, as well as streaming a number of other promotions live and taped events from around the world.
ESPN+ will be able to put up all UFC events from 1993 to 2018 up for archives. From 2018 on, they will be able to add their events, but not the events from another partner, nor PPV events, which Fight Pass will have. ESPN+ also won’t have access to the non-Fight Pass library of boxing, kickboxing and other MMA promotions like Pride, Strikeforce and WEC.
There will also be a second tier ESPN+ deal that would allow fans to order the individual Fight Pass live events.
In addition, the ESPN+ deal is only for the United States, so UFC has the rights to sell these shows internationally or put them on Fight Pass outside the U.S.
ESPN+ will stream the entire shows from start-to-finish meaning no prelims. Without television time cues, they won’t be stalling to fill time and only do one fight every 30 minutes, like FS 1 does.
If we go with the idea the average UFC fan that subscribes to ESPN+ will go monthly rather than annually, that would mean the average viewer would be $60 per year. To make that make economic sense, ESPN+ would need 2.5 million regular UFC fans purchasing the service, a ridiculous number since Fight Pass has hovered between 400,000 and 500,000 subscribers for not quite as many shows. It’s also ridiculous because UFC rarely gets 2.5 million viewers these days for shows that are free on FOX.
Nevertheless, part of this is ESPN trying to establish a new service and thus were willing to pay a figure that can’t be economically justified by normal business value, and were willing to because everyone is getting into streaming at some level. UFC is in a good place. WWE is in a good place as well, as while they haven’t fallen into this level of a sweetheart deal, they did get the Facebook Watch deal earlier this year (WWE received a number slightly below $1.6 million for the 12 week
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I like the idea that the ESPN+ cards will have less downtime.
Seems like you will need both FP & ESPN+ for full UFC archives & events though.
Botter reported that if you have ESPN+, you get FP for $5.
That seems tough to do since the merchant processing will not be the same.
But Dave said that FP events can be bought through ESPN+
