Gotta hand it to those cagey guys now running Paramount. Less than a week into their reign and they’ve already shaken up the sports rights landscape, as YAHOO! Sports’ Joe Edwards gushed yesterday morning:
In some breaking news for the MMA community, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) will leave ESPN to join Paramount under a seven-year contract valued at $7.7 billion, set to begin in 2026.
The deal, announced Monday morning, grants CBS and the streaming service Paramount+ exclusive rights to air 13 of the main event or “numbered” UFC fight cards, and 30 of their “Fight Night” events annually, per AP News.
The agreement will also effectively end the UFC’s pay-per-view paywall model in the United States. Under the new contract, all UFC programming will reportedly be available to Paramount+ subscribers at no extra cost, with select “marquee” events also broadcast on CBS.
And this on the heels of last week’s stunner where fellow TKO company WWE made their own bed with ESPN which THE DESK’s one-man investigative unit Matthew Keys reported had a similar impact on how and what they charge:
The deal will include live pay-per-view events — which WWE now calls “premium live events” — like WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Royal Rumble, Survivor Series and Money in the Bank, which will be available through ESPN’s forthcoming streaming plan ESPN Unlimited. Most cable and satellite subscribers have included access to ESPN Unlimited, which costs $30 per month on its own.
And when FRONT OFFICE SPORTS’ terrific trio of Eric Fisher, Colin Salao, and Margaret Fleming actually got White to man-splain this in his words, I for one was pretty much inclined to begin to blow taps for the cash-first model that was especially prolific in ring combat sports and made an awful lot of money for both promoters and operators for decades:
White acknowledges that shifting away from the PPV structure beginning next year will expose UFC to far more potential fans. In the current ESPN+ deal, UFC numbered events are an add-on option at $79.99 per event. In the new deal, all the numbered events and Fight Nights will be available on Paramount+, with “select” simulcasts on the numbered events appearing on the CBS broadcast network. A specific number of linear simulcasts has not been finalized, but White says, “We’ll be ready to go whenever CBS and Paramount want to.”
Except literally minutes later a story from THE NEW YORK POST’s Erich Richter had White warbling a different tune:
Halt the funeral procession. On the same day the UFC announced an earth-shattering $7.7 billion deal with Paramount, Dana White, the promotion’s CEO and president, tells The Post that pay-per-view formatted events could still fit into its plans.
“There’s no pay-per-view involved in this deal,” White said. “Let’s say there’s a scenario –– I am involved in boxing, I am involved in slapping, I am involved in jiu-jitsu and I’m involved in the UFC –– What I love about this business is, I can lay out what we think the fights are going to be for a year, and a fight will pop up that I never saw coming. A star will pop up out of somewhere. Anything is possible. And you could do a one-off pay-per-view. I am going to be on pay-per-view this Saturday. Pay-per-view is not dead.”
Well, I feel somewhat better. There’s something about the communal experience of watching a fight with a bunch of folks that are sharing the exorbitant cost of something that could conceivably be over in a matter of minutes that I enjoyed in my youth that I don’t think Gen Z should be denied. Especially since we’re living in an age where that cost is barely more than a couple of orders of wings from DoorDash and Venmo makes settling the bill a whole lot easier.
What White is basically leaving the door open for is for newly-created content to have some options that could funnel incremental cash into everyone’s pockets. The kind of deal-making that a plurality of America somehow responds to favorably these days.
And along those lines, White naturally addressed a particular event which immediately became the subject of speculation as to just how UFC and Paramount became partners, which none other than CBS NEWS’ website tantalized thusly:
In an interview with CBS Sports, UFC CEO Dana White said his company is talking with the Trump administration about hosting a fight at the White House on July 4, 2026, to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary. “Imagine a massive fight on the lawn of the White House on CBS,” White said. A White House source familiar with the matter said such an event is anticipated next July 4.
Given the usual options available to a network like CBS, even a franchise that has been at best a middling performer for ESPN that is frequently relegated to later time slots especially in football season is a highly appealing option. USDB shows via its compilation of Nielsen data that unlike a heck of a lot of other programming–even in sports–the overall audience trajectory over the last three years and change has been stable, with persons 2+ typically in the range of 700-800k and about 45 per cent of those being adults under 50. Take a gander at the profile of CBS’ lineup–even in sports–and you’d be hard-pressed to find demography that favorable (Do remember that Mr. Colbert was at roughly one-fifth that proportion).
And if the model that ESPN is using for its top sports events is any indication–and one can’t imagine that someone like Jeff Shell isn’t compiling a dossier on that– there will be opportunities for alternate feeds for an event of that magnitude . Want to hear the two Ds provide their own commentary? Toss in another $10–or maybe just sign up for Paramount Plus on a sustaining basis for a few shekels more. And if they can afford THAT, chances are they’re gullible-or loyal–enough to stick around for the new season of TULSA KING. And a LOT younger than the ones that have been around so far. Maybe there’s even some other audio options that would provide the kind of fodder the news ombdusman would approve of that could tempt other buyers. One with real-time fact checking perhaps?
Best of all, maybe this will ultimately count toward those $20 million in promotional considerations that Ellison reportedly ponied up. At that price tag depending upon the ultimate number of events, at worst this could cover a substantive amount of that total.
But mind you, this isn’t merely about politics. It’s about paying for views, just now it’s a game of augmentation. So while we may be burying what we traditionally called PPV, it sure looks like the thrill of overpaying isn’t quite gone. It’s just evolved. Just like how you order food and settle how to pay for the event.
Courage…