When the UFC and Bellator go head-to-head on a Saturday night on dueling streaming services, as they will this weekend, it tells you how quickly the industry is changing.
Sports television rights fees have skyrocketed in recent years due to entertainment executives feeling that because of changes in lifestyles and technology, the value of live sports has never been higher. Unlike scripted entertainment programming, the idea is that live sports are destination programming that people watch live and are considered DVR-proof.
When WME-IMG (now Endeavor) purchased the UFC for nearly $4 billion, a deal that was considered crazy by many at the time, the key to the price was the idea that the UFC’s value to television would increase, and in the next television rights negotiations, they’d get a huge increase over a long period of time.