Curly Howard
05-05-2003, 01:02 PM
Zuffa has officially announced a 20-episode TV deal with The Sunshine Network. The deal was announced in the UFC's official e-mail newsletter on the same day that the first episode of the show actually aired on The Sunshine Network. The show will air every Thursday at 7:00 PM Eastern Time on The Sunshine Network for the next 20 weeks. Each episode will feature interviews with fighters and videotaped fights from previous UFC pay-per-views. The show will be hosted by UFC play-by-play man Mike Goldberg, and will be available in all 5.9 million homes that have access to The Sunshine Network (both in Florida and throughout the country via satellite).
The Pro Wrestling Torch Newsletter, (which also covers MMA,) reports that Zuffa is in the process of negotiating similar deals with NESN and New York's MSG Network, both of which are also regional networks that have satellite availability throughout the country. As previously discussed by MMA Weekly, this deal with The Suneshine Network is good news for MMA fans nationwide. You may be thinking that it's meaningless to you unless you live in one of the six million homes that has access to The Sunshine Network. In fact, this deal (and any similar deal with other regional networks in the future) could be crucial in helping Zuffa get a national cable deal. Given all of the cable networks that are afraid of the content of a potential UFC TV show, or skeptical about what kind of ratings the show would produce after a couple weeks or months, or concerned that not enough advertisers would want to associate themselves with the product, this is a golden opportunity for Zuffa.
After 20 or more episodes of the UFC TV show have aired on The Sunshine Network, Zuffa will have concrete facts to bring to negotiating meetings with national cable networks. Zuffa will hopefully be able to say, "This is the show that we ran for 20 episodes on a network that reaches six million US homes, this is the content of the shows that aired... nobody died, nobody protested the UFC being on the network, here are the good ratings that the show did, here are all the advertisers that were willing and happy to buy advertising on the show," and so on. Having this as a negotiating tool wouldn't make it a foregone conclusion that the UFC would get a weekly TV deal with a national cable network, but it would make it much more likely to happen.
The Pro Wrestling Torch Newsletter, (which also covers MMA,) reports that Zuffa is in the process of negotiating similar deals with NESN and New York's MSG Network, both of which are also regional networks that have satellite availability throughout the country. As previously discussed by MMA Weekly, this deal with The Suneshine Network is good news for MMA fans nationwide. You may be thinking that it's meaningless to you unless you live in one of the six million homes that has access to The Sunshine Network. In fact, this deal (and any similar deal with other regional networks in the future) could be crucial in helping Zuffa get a national cable deal. Given all of the cable networks that are afraid of the content of a potential UFC TV show, or skeptical about what kind of ratings the show would produce after a couple weeks or months, or concerned that not enough advertisers would want to associate themselves with the product, this is a golden opportunity for Zuffa.
After 20 or more episodes of the UFC TV show have aired on The Sunshine Network, Zuffa will have concrete facts to bring to negotiating meetings with national cable networks. Zuffa will hopefully be able to say, "This is the show that we ran for 20 episodes on a network that reaches six million US homes, this is the content of the shows that aired... nobody died, nobody protested the UFC being on the network, here are the good ratings that the show did, here are all the advertisers that were willing and happy to buy advertising on the show," and so on. Having this as a negotiating tool wouldn't make it a foregone conclusion that the UFC would get a weekly TV deal with a national cable network, but it would make it much more likely to happen.