Right now, the UFC is broadcasting the pre-prelims on FACEBOOK. There are 5.3 million people viewing it. I'm not even a big MMA fan but I'm enjoying this tremendously. How many great boxing fights have I missed because they were not broadcast. I know TopRank puts the prelims on their website which is great but facebook is even smarter. and HBO, why don't they do sht like this when the idea is already out thre?
I think they even show the UFC pre-lims on SPIKE TV, cable channel. Undercards to the big fight. And they keep on advertising the main event during commercial breaks. And then they give a reminder that it's 30 minutes before the main show starts and you should order the PPV now. Then they cut the free broadcast once the main events start. (maybe 3 fights, maybe more)
boxing overall as a world wide sport and the UFC which is a company owned by an individual and all people who fight under the ufc are employed by the ufc..... should not even be compared.... boxing is made up of too many elements to make a broad generalized statement like that....
UFC is showing all 12 fights of the card. 5 of them on Facebook, 2 of them on SpikeTV and then the main 5 on the PPV.
thing with hbo, is they dont care ......it really pisses me off that they can go through all the time, money, bull**** , production and air 1 fight...and if it ends in a td2 because of a head butt...shows over good night....also like showtime the other night...the entire broadcast lasted 50 minutes...one fight was cancelled and vic d fight ended in 6 rds...
Of course they could. And one of the first things is this: This content is protected That is all seven UFC champions presented for a Q&A event at a fan expo the day before tonight's fights. You can talk about boxing being this global sport but boxing has less strength in depth than UFC and a big part of that is how their weight divisions make sense and the championships are reasonably unified (there are other promotions but the UFC is dominant - even more so when the Strikeforce unification fights happen). No sanctioning body let alone the sport of boxing could present such a show of strength as that image. The other major thing is the use of cable television. Network TV is a dead end - to secure decent ratings on CBS you're going to have to sacrifice big money ppv bouts. And CBS will only want the occassional live bout if that. And what you have to remember is that today most big basic cable stations reach into as many homes as the big networks - maybe more when you factor in local affiliates not taking exotic/unproven programming. Securing a presence on Spike or TNT (the latter should be easy given their links to HBO) and getting regular hype shows, 'boxing after dark' style specials, etc would be much more useful than CBS agreeing to promote a fighter in Pacquiao who's already over.
For that to happen fighters will have to take massive pay cuts. UFC fighters get paid peanuts for risking their health. Secondly, that would mean HBO Showtime would actually have to show decent under-card fights to attract viewers.