With news that ESPN+ will now be the exclusive provider of UFC pay-per-views in the U.S., there are bound to be some questions as to how and why and to the benefit of whom – and some of the early answers from UFC President Dana White only invite more questions.
Here are five we ought to be asking ourselves as the UFC and ESPN deepen their connection in ways that will affect fans almost immediately.
1. Increased flexibility makes savings possible, but does that make them inevitable?
In touting the benefit of this deal from a fan perspective, UFC President Dana White pointed out the difficulty of offering discounts or bundles when multiple pay-per-view providers are involved. Now that everything runs through ESPN, he said, the company has more freedom to cut fans a deal in various ways.
This makes some sense. Now that the UFC and ESPN are the only two parties involved in selling residential pay-per-views in the U.S. (which is historically the biggest market for UFC pay-per-views by far), they could conceivably charge less and make more.
But just because the UFC can pass that savings on to the fans, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will. For new subscribers to ESPN+, there’s already an offer to get a year of ESPN+ with a free pay-per-view thrown in. That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not exactly a game-changer. If the UFC wants us to believe that it’s making our lives better by limiting our choices on how we buy and watch pay-per-views, it will need to come with a noticeable drop in price.
2. Are we starting to truly understand the UFC’s value to ESPN now?
When this deal between ESPN and the UFC was first announced, it wasn’t hard to see what ESPN was thinking. How do you drive new subscriptions to a digital streaming service? You buy rights to broadcast a product that comes with a loyal audience. If that audience is already used to paying for content, as MMA fans have been doing basically for as long as the sport has existed, even better.
That combo left only one tier of UFC programming beyond ESPN’s reach. This deal, which extends the UFC-ESPN partnership by two years, closes that gap.
And while fans might grumble in the short-term, are they really going to sit out pay-per-views they otherwise would have purchased just because they can no longer buy with their TV remotes? Seems likely that even the biggest technophobes will figure out how to work their Fire TV Stick as soon as a can’t-miss mega card rolls around.
And once ESPN+ gets us in the door (by giving us no other option, but still), chances are it’ll get a sizable portion of us to hang around.
That has to be the hope, anyway.
3. What’s the value of ‘one-stop shopping’ to people who aren’t leaving the house?
Watching White’s interview with our own John Morgan, you get hit with an awful lot of buzz words but not a ton of detail. In attempting to sell us on the brilliance of his latest move, White insisted that ESPN is now “a one-stop shop” for fight fans. As if the big gripe among the pay-per-view buying public was that we’re all so sick of dealing with the vendor of our choice.
One way to turn this into a real value is to package it all together. If ESPN has all the UFC’s content on lockdown, why not give me one price for access to everything, and make it cheaper to buy it all together rather than one piece at a time? You might even get me to watch stuff I’d otherwise skip, once I know I’ve already paid for it.
Again, though, that’s what you’d do only if you were interested in increasing the value to the consumer. If instead you see the MMA fanbase as a giant piggybank to be turned upside down and shaken for every last coin, you probably wouldn’t bother. Not unless early returns convince you that you have to.
4. Did the potential audience for UFC events just get smaller?
No matter how White spins it, this deal represents a new limitation on how we view UFC pay-per-views – not an expansion. You have to sign up with ESPN+ to even have the option of giving the UFC your money, which means there’s now one extra step involved in the purchase process.
And while these days a lot of people have incorporated various forms of streaming media into their lives, but not everyone has or even can. If you live in a rural area with poor internet (or you have spotty internet for any other reason), this must feel like the UFC is telling you to keep your money and pursue other interests.
Also, as anyone who’s watched fights on ESPN+ likely knows by now, streaming has some limitations. You get glitches and delays. You get freezes and crashes. You get an app that asks you to sign up for a free trial even when you’re already signed in.
That’s mildly annoying for five bucks a month. It could be a dealbreaker for $60 per event.
So why do it? Why risk limiting the availability of a sport you’re trying to grow? Here we return to the usual answer: there’s money in it. A lot of indicators suggest that the UFC is firmly done with the growth phase and is ready to focus all its energy on the payout phase. This new development would seem to support that conclusion.
5. How, exactly, does this benefit fighters?
In the process of claiming that this deal is a win for every living human, White included fighters among those who will benefit. What he didn’t do was explain how.
If I’m one of the lucky few fighters getting a cut of pay-per-view revenues, and if the potential audience for those events has now been reduced, however slightly, you can bet I’m going to have some questions.
This will be particularly relevant for the few superstar fighters who stand to get a cut of the truly massive pay-per-views. Events on the lower end of the sales spectrum may not be affected too much by this, since they cater mostly to hardcore fans who are likely to already be ESPN+ subscribers.
But to hit high six figures or more in pay-per-view sales, it takes a lot of buys from people who don’t normally watch this stuff. Will all those people be willing to jump through this extra hoop just to make the purchase? Or will some of them balk at giving ESPN+ the opportunity to keep charging their credit cards if they forget to cancel after the event?
Obviously, the UFC is making more money this way, otherwise it wouldn’t do it. So where’s the fighters’ cut of that increased revenue, especially if the change might mean less money under their current contracts? That’s a pressing issue for fighters. They are, after all, the whole reason we’re paying ESPN and the UFC in the first place.
For more on the upcoming UFC schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
