Weigh in MMA fans...

[Imtotallynottribe]

Hey, were those Bellator fights on DAZN?

The streaming service for combat sports is making some waves, they already have Eddie Hearn's promotional stable out of the UK with Anthony Joshua, and word is breaking now that they signed Canelo for his next fight and a multi year deal. His December fight is going to stream on the $10/mo service, instead of PPV. It's kind of a tune up, it's hard to imagine an actual big time Canelo fight not being on PPV, but DAZN is throwing a ton of money around.

I think they're also in the Bellator business.

It's a niche sport, but what's going on right now with boxing and television is incredibly interesting, and also on the cutting edge of the future, between Top Rank's deal with ESPN+ and DAZN's deals with Hearn and now Golden Boy. We've seen a lot of simulcasting of sports on streaming platforms, but I'm not sure if we've seen major deals in which traditional outlets were eschewed completely in favor of streaming options.

Looks like Bellators deal is to air 7 DAZN exclusive shows and 15 that are on simultaneously with their Paramount channel. The most recent fights we were talking about were either exclusively on Paramount or were one of the 15 joint broadcasts.

 

[Lurker1999]

I didn't read the whole thread but I'm still a huge Fedor fan

 

[ohio#1nolefan]

Benson Hensderson went there when he was still near the top - he was feeling disrespected by the UFC at the time.

And he has looked like a washed up fighter since going there..
I liked/like him but he has looked terrible in Bellator. Although His last fight was better.

 

[Nole Lou]

Looks like Bellators deal is to air 7 DAZN exclusive shows and 15 that are on simultaneously with their Paramount channel. The most recent fights we were talking about were either exclusively on Paramount or were one of the 15 joint broadcasts.

Cool. I would imagine Bellator just got a huge boost then, as sure enough Canelo Alvarez and the rest of the Golden Boy roster just inked a deal to DAZN. And as reported, Canelo's fights will be streaming along at the $10/mo rate, as opposed to the typical $70 pay per view. That's going to theoretically put a ton of new eyes on Bellator. I'll be buying DAZN for sure, and between their deals with Matchroom Boxing and Golden Boy, and their Bellator deal, they're supposedly going to have an elite card basically every weekend of either MMA or boxing. I'm not a huge MMA fan, but I definitely would have watched the fights discussed had I thought about it and had DAZN, and outside of football season I could see myself checking out the Bellator card when there's no boxing. Much more likely than buying a UFC PPV, or ahem, other sources. Not because it's better than UFC, just because it would be right there.

So, where the hell is the money behind DAZN coming from? So Bellator claims a "nine figure" deal over five years, which is something for a product otherwise playing on tape delay on something called the Paramount Network. They signed Eddie Hearn's Matchroom Boxing out of the UK for a "billion dollars" over eight years. Supposedly not all eight years are entirely guaranteed, but it's still a giant war chest - more annually in that deal alone than HBO and Showtime's combined annual budgets have been. And now they've signed Canelo to the richest athlete contract in history...five years, $336 million (for 11 fights). That's just for Canelo, not counting what they're paying for the rest of the Golden Boy cards, which is undisclosed.

Where's that money coming from? Russian Mafia? Yakuza? Cartels?

By the way, DAZN's being run by our old buddy, former ESPN head John Skipper, he of the coke habit and presumably unrelated champion of the ACC Network.

 

[fsUTampa]

?

By the way, DAZN's being run by our old buddy, former ESPN head John Skipper, he of the coke habit and presumably unrelated champion of the ACC Network.

Which all but guarantees it's going to crash hard, and leave a lot of people out of jobs and money. And that doesn't even get into the whole branding of what "DAZN" is (hell, even called...).

 

[Nole Lou]

Which all but guarantees it's going to crash hard, and leave a lot of people out of jobs and money. And that doesn't even get into the whole branding of what "DAZN" is (hell, even called...).

Apparently, it's pronounced "Da Zone!" which is terrible and sounds ridiculous. I'll call it "dazin" if I need speak it.