Jeffrey Horn, Jr. vs. Terence Allan Crawford

A month, dude. For some but not all of ESPN's content. On top of having already paid your cable provider to include the ESPN family of networks in your subscription. "Fair", really?

Unless they do away entirely with having live boxing on ESPN & ESPN2 (which basically means I have no reason to even have ESPN in my cable package), this is just going to dilute their product so that some is free while certain events require you to pay extra for a service that - if you don't care about the rest of their programming besides this sport - is an unnecessary fleecing. They would need to put on more than a dozen fights per year to have it not work out to essentially being a PPV model at 5 dollar a pop.

 

Nope, apparently Lomachenko vs. Linares will be on traditional ESPN on your set top box.

ESPN+ will have 18 fights per year, it seems, twelve domestic and six international.

The first international card will be Khan vs. LoGreco on April 21st.

 

Five bucks per fight, basically. Unless the quality of cards is amazing, I'm not really happy to have to all of a sudden pay extra to watch some of the boxing that until now has already been included with the fees I already pay to have ESPN on TV (only for the sake of boxing, mind you!)

And unlike with the way it has been so far (which they shouldn't have changed, because it wasn't broken, everything was fine) I can't watch these fights on my big HD TV, just my comparably tiny laptop monitor or infinitesimally smaller phone.

This is them double-dipping.

 

You get to watch those fights on tiny screens.

I get to watch Showtime (and HBO) fights in Hi-Def on a large screen optimized for Hi-Def programming. I also get access to all the rest of Showtime's and HBO's content, a lot of which is shows and movies that I like, which to me sweetens the pot and justifies the higher price tag since I probably won't care about 99.99999999999999999999% of the non-boxing-related offerings from ESPN+.

 

To be fair, I did just read that having ESPN+ does give you access to, supposedly, both the full ESPN & Top Rank boxing libraries. That is pretty cool. But in terms of live shows, just eighteen of them a year for $60 - and restricted to watching on a PC or mobile device/tablet - is a bit steep and, upon first glance, really not a welcome expense on top of already paying to have my cable subscription include every channel available in my particular market that ever features live boxing. There's a whole lot more to live boxing than ESPN, and they are basically with this move putting boxing fans in a very awkward position, especially lower-income fans, especially ones that don't happen to already be cord-cutters, and especially ones to whom the rest of the content the ESPN+ service might offer holds little to no interest.

 

It will be a streaming app for smartphones, tablets, and I think computers. None of its fights will be shown on television anywhere in the US, they will have exclusive distribution copyrights in this country for these specific monthly Top Rank cards, as well as the North American rights to half a dozen international cards (including, at the very least - since Khan vs. LoGreco is the only international fight we have to go on so far - partnerships with Matchroom)

All the non-international cards will be Top Rank shows, 100%..

 

Tony Weeks.

Judges will be Ignatius Missailidis (Aus), Guido Cavalleri (Ita), and Burt Clements.