ESPN has made a big bet on boxing will it pay off ?

HBO and SHO ratings keep dropping, budgets are getting cut and fight dates are being scrapped.
Good move by Top Rank, if the ratings keep up.

 

They should have never dumped Friday Night Fights in the first place but I'm glad ESPN has interest and that Bob Arum and his stable have realistic pay expectations.
Bob called it long ago about how overpaying fighters would mess things up. ESPN is matching him $1 per viewer so he will definitely be putting on shows that people want to see. That means somewhere in between this 4 year deal Manny Pacquiao is going to be sacrificed to the public on ESPN to one of Bob Arum's rising stars.
I really like the way the man brings along his fighters. I don't know about the pay issues but this situation seems to fit everyone he has at the moment.

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ESPN has lost about 15 million subscribers in the last 5 years and are spiraling downward..

HBO and Showtime have more subscribers than ESPN.

My guess is that the ESPN advantage is that their average subscribers are probably more likely to watch a boxing match than the average HBO or Showtime subscriber.

 

I really miss FNF :/
Even the lower level fights were fun.

 

Isn't ESPN free with ANY cable subscription? I don't think that I can remove ESPN even if I wanted to.

 

As far as I understand, it's Bob Arum's plan.
I would recommend this podcast to get the idea: http://walkingthefloor.com/episode-109-bob-arum/

 

I've predicted a tipping point will happen where, in an era of skyrocketing content costs, boxing becomes a compelling value play for networks again. Live sports is a differentiating factor from streaming services, but the major sports leagues are expensive and seasonal. Boxing has been left out of the bull market thus far

For a fraction of what ESPN spends on rights with leagues with far more bargaining power, they can fill the void left by the dwindling budgets of Showtime and HBO (who themselves, I believe, will spend more in the future as the costs of other original programming continues to increase).

 

This.
I do think ESPNs boxing ratings will continue to rise, if good cards are put on it.

 

Nobody gives a **** about cable anymore. You have cable now? Yipeee nobody cares because it's not the 90s anymore. Cable boxing and PPV boxing is dying.

ESPN is still technically cable and you have to buy the sports package to get it. But even still it's less "cable" than HBO and much less "cable" than PPV.

Do these dumbasses not realize how old they said sound when they say the words pay per view? Young people today aren't going to pay **** on top of cable that many of them don't even have anymore because of NetFlix to watch boxing. Especially since boxing PPV has turned fans off because of Mayweather boring PPV. Like Floyd or not people paid money to see him lose a fight and get KO'ed. That never happened and his fights after 2007 were always extremely boring. So he effectively killed PPV taste along with it being an outdated concept anyways.

The well is dry. The only way to build it back up is to put on aggressive TV fighters and have them fight the best.

 

ESPN is struggling financially, as they have detailed multiple times this year, and looking for live sports programming that is on the dirt cheap.

That is why they did the boxing deal, their new F1 deal for next season, among others.

 

NFL ratings are falling. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

 

"One by one, the old promoters are gone. Death, natural or not, prison, deported. Bob Arum is the only one left, because he always made money for his partners."

 

Well, I'm not sure what you're trying to say here... First of all, Arum is not a benefactor of boxing, it's his job to make money for himself out of boxing/boxers. Second, yes, he make money for his partners/boxers. And not only his, actually. Like Rigondeaux, who had left Arum and sh** on him in his Twitter account, received two biggest purses in his entire career from whom? Yes, from Bob Arum.