Comments Thread For: Kovalev-Pascal Scores Big With HBO Home Viewers

[JakeNDaBox]

Sergey Kovalev enjoyed a triumphant ring return on the heels of a Fighter of the Year-level campaign in 2014, scoring an 8th round stoppage of Jean Pascal in their March 14 light heavyweight title fight on the road Montreal, Canada.

In addition to becoming the first to stop the former light heavyweight king, Kovalev further solidified his stance atop the division and as a ratings magnet. The unbeaten knockout artist was a hit with the home audience, as the bout registered 1.152 million viewers, according to data provided by Nielsen Media Research.

The bout peaked at 1.2 million home viewers. [Click Here To Read More]

[Hougigo]

That's good I guess, I thought it would've done more

[The Problem Child]

WAR HBO AND WAR SUBSCRIPTION NETWORK TV!!! DON'T LET THESE ****** SEWER FREE PUBLIC TV CHANNELS TAKE OVER!! I will always stay subscribed to HBO and SHO. Loyalty for life.

[aldo5408]

Eh I think chavez vs fontara is gona do hella more numbers

[The Big Dunn]

HBO struck ****ing gold with Kov. Low paid guy with huge ratings. If he fights Stevevnson this year maybe they should put it on PPV.

Kov showed great skills in the bhop fight and showed some vulnerability and a great chin while destroying Pascal. HBO needs to get him a high profile fight now.

[bigdunny1]

HBO is still the Gold Standard in Boxing. PBC will not change that. What Al is doing is paying ridiculous amounts of money for purses, production and promotion only to get marginally higher overall rating. Kathy Duva said it best.

"I did a show on NBC two, three years ago. I had a $150,000 rights fee. I had to live in that" she said. "At the peak of my show, I had 3.2 (million watching), they had 4.2. He went out and spent $8 million on marketing, production, the time buy and only got a million more people to watch than I did. My marketing budget on that show was $5,000." - Duva

http://bloguin.com/queensberryrules/2015-articles/kathy-duva-premier-boxing-champions-is-doomed-from-the-start.html

The problem with Haymon's business model is he is spending way too money to put on each show and he's paying millions on top of that to the Networks just for the airtime. Yes he is getting better ratings then Friday Night Fights and other network fights in the past. Except those fights were made on a budget where all the fighters combined made less then 1mil. Same with MMA cards where the fighters making less money. Unless you have HBO or Showtime putting up the money I don't see how what he's doing will work. He's spending too much money for it to sustain itself and not getting monster ratings to bring in the advertisers to fund it.

HBO has the best model and doesn't rely on ratings and advertisers the way Network TV does. And they broke business with Al because they didn't want to overpay for his fighters to fight bums.

[jjsmyth87]

HBO struck ****ing gold with Kov. Low paid guy with huge ratings. If he fights Stevevnson this year maybe they should put it on PPV.

Kov showed great skills in the bhop fight and showed some vulnerability and a great chin while destroying Pascal. HBO needs to get him a high profile fight now.

Low paid? He made 3.25 million for this fight. In comparison, timothy Bradley only made 2 million his last fight, and amir khan only made 900k to fight Devon Alexander on a ShowTime card.

[bojangles1987]

I wouldn't say that's big. Respectable, but you would hope for more.

[lefthook2daliva]

Show good fights, get good numbers.

War HBO!

[JakeNDaBox]

I wouldn't say that's big. Respectable, but you would hope for more.

Kovalev retained 85% of the viewers from the Hopkins fight. Hopkins is a much bigger TV draw than Pascal. In terms of expectations for the night, HBO was very pleased.