Comments Thread For: PBC on ESPN Averages 799K Viewers, Peaks at 1.1 Million

[Scipio2009]

Serious question: Would Keith Thurman be a bigger star if he had been with Top Rank / HBO the past 3 years instead of with Al?

No.

All things being equal, Keith Thurman wouldn't have seen anywhere near the depth of competition, let alone getting the opportunities to get his face/personality out to more fans than what he's picked up with Haymon.

You add that, only recently, Top Rank found the confidence to take Crawford to his hometown to fight, and you could imagine what they would've tried to do with Thurman.

[mjgaz6]

I hope his investors pull the plugs on this fiasco soon. It's not good for boxing. Just another monopoly with a bunch of uncompetitive, bad match-ups. And the whole set-up is way too sterile. No ring announcer, ring girls, or entrance with possees into the ring.

[BWC]

Not true at all. XFL was backed by huge investors and smart business people they aired on NBC to monster ratings to debut and they had a 2-3 year business plan and expected to have loses the first 2 years. Problem is the ratings tanked after their debut and fell every month and they like PBC were dependent on ratings to draw TV sponsors. They didn't have the ratings couldn't get TV sponsors and their product was simply too expensive and they lost more money then expected and that 2-3 year business plan went out the window with them folding after season one.

Investors plan for loses but did PBC investors plan for this kind of loses? The ratings debuted were mediocre at best and have fallen consistently since. They couldn't get any tv sponsors to start and it's almost impossible to expect them now when the ratings are spiraling down. They have to pay millions to the networks to air the show, they pay millions on these bloated fight purses that are far above market price, they pay for the advertisement. No TV sponsors to help pay, they are getting almost nothing at the live gate with tons of stories of how they can't sell tickets and are forced to give tons away and comp tickets each event. They are now added to huge lawsuits. They expected to lose money but did they expect a huge dumpster fire of their money and lawsuits? At some point like the XFL investors they will cut their loses and scrap the 2-3 year plan.

FFS, the WNBA has a TV deal OK. PBC does better than non-playoff NHL games and the NHL has a deal with NBC worth $200mm a year. Regular-season MLB games outdraw NHL playoff games for God's sake.

Haymon will walk away with a very nice TV deal and this handwringing will be for naught

[Eff Pandas]

Lmao, at making it sound like Haymon just started in the boxing business with PBC.

Haymon has been in this sport almost 10 years now, ain't built ONE start from scratch yet!

Matter of fact, he just stole a star from top rank, it took him one fight to ruin what top rank took years to build up. Chavez Jr.

He hasn't been in the game the same way he's been, he hasn't been dealing with many guys who weren't unknown til lately. It seems more like he was doing cats favors initially more than in it like he is now. The fact is what he was doing for most of the 10 years he's been in the game & what he's been doing the last 4 months are completely different roads & stars will be built via PBC & its silly to suggest otherwise. Again most cats don't become stars anyway, but by this time next year you'll see. Although I'd guess by that time you'll be ****ting on Haymon &/or PBC for some other reason.

[AddiX]

he's been in boxing more than 10 years, but i think he did a great job with Forrest taking him from unknown to fighter of the year. he's also got a few young guns with talent that can go far, spence and the unknown Erickson Lubin can becomes stars, we'll see.

Forrest wasn't an unknown, he was U.S. Olympian who fought Tszyu in the olympics, people knew who he was.

Immediately after Forrest became a star, he lost it to Mayorga.

besides just fhe fact you need to go that far back tells you just how few stars Haymon has built.

[sicko]

@nicoleduva: ESPN paid $500k for Arreola-Stiverne last year. 940,000 viewers. PBC paid just Thurman & Collazo $2 mil. 799,000 viewers.

@NashvilleBoxing: @steveucnlive @MrGAM3R49 @3bmboxing Old FNF budget was around $60k, Thurman's $1.5m purse alone was 25x that amount

From 3 milllion peak to 1 million, those numbers were very poor looking at what most Journalists are saying. Behind wimbledon, nascar and ufc.

LMFAO at "Journalist" Nicole Duva is Kathy Duva Daughter all she post is negative PBC stuff because PBC bumped her month from NBC...Just Saying

But yeah the number could have been better but again stiff competition with the UFC having bigger match ups like Lawler vs McDonald and of course McGregor who has a huge buzz right now. UFC>Boxing in the US right now overall and it is not even debatable so Boxing has work to do. Doesn't help the sport either when so called "Boxing Fans" are even rooting against their own sport

[Mitchell Kane]

But wasn't the objective of PBConESPN to replace a FNF series that wasn't able to generate ratings or attention, considering ESPN isn't technically a free channel compared to NBC CBS and ABC ??

Im just coming from a devils advocate point of view. normally when shows are cancelled or replaced, aren't the normal successors meant to do better than they did in the initial run until theres a pattern of consistency to decide whether it'll stay or go?

The "ESPN is free" claim is such a misnomer.

ESPN is one of the most expensive cable channels, costing around $6, and it has been losing subscribers in recent years to people ditching cable (and there's an increasing push for unbundling of cable channels).

The great unbundling of TV has begun, with HBO and Showtime offering their content via stand-alone subscriptions, and Sony announcing that it will soon offer consumers the ability to select individual channels for its PlayStation Vue TV subscription service. But which channels would consumers actually pay for if they could pick and chose?

The answer to that question may surprise you, and is bad news for at least some cable networks.

Take ESPN, for example. The Disney-owned sports network is often quoted as the prime reason for people not cutting the cord, and is by far the most expensive cable network. But a new survey from Digitalsmiths found that only 35.7% of consumers would add ESPN to their personal a la carte lineup of TV channels if they had the choice.

http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/a-la-carte-these-are-the-tv-channels-people-would-actually-pay-for-1201520900/

The Journal reports that ESPN has lost 3.2 million subscribers in more than a year. Since 2011, ESPN's reach in US households has fallen 7.2% after having nearly 100% of the pay-TV market, or about 100 million households.

http://www.businessinsider.com/cost-cutting-is-coming-to-espn-2015-7#ixzz3fszZIMMa

Even some cable companies are starting to explore cheaper alternatives to cable bundles:

Comcast said late on Sunday it would begin selling a web-based service called Stream, with content from the major broadcast networks and PBS and HBO. The programming will be available as a $15 add-on to Comcast’s internet-only package.

Stream includes some bells and whistles that Netflix and Hulu do not have, including 20 hours of DVR storage for live programming. It will also have commercials, with the exception of content from networks like HBO that are not ad-supported.

“You see more and more [video providers] pushing out bundles without the vast majority of the cable networks, especially the really expensive networks such as ESPN,” Greenfield said. (“Expensive”, in this context, refers to the affiliate fee paid to a network by a cable company.)

The industry average affiliate fee for a subscriber is 25 cents a month. ESPN pulls in a full $6.55 each month from essentially every one of the nation’s 100m cable subscribers, according to recent estimates from SNL Kagan. Ballooning affiliate fees and bundling are among the reasons US cable bills are so high.

Other companies providing streaming television content, or on the cusp of a launch, include Netflix, which saw its stock target raised to $700 a share by Goldman Sachs on Monday; Amazon Prime; Google Fiber; Apple TV; and Hulu, a joint venture between Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, Fox and Disney. Netflix has 40.3m subscribers in the US, and 62m worldwide.

There are myriad advantages to the model for cable operators: Comcast can sell a much cheaper network package without ESPN or the raft of little-watched networks like WeTV or VH1 Classics that are part of any deal with their essential corporate siblings (AMC and Nickelodeon respectively). It just rarely gets the chance to do so, given the way those deals are negotiated by the networks.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/13/comcast-stream-web-based-add-on-service-internet

In the case of Verizon, ESPN is now taking them to court over this issue:

Sports giant ESPN has sued Verizon over its plans for “skinny bundle” cable TV packages, which give consumers the option of choosing a smaller package of channels than the traditional basic cable subscription.

ESPN has been spending massive amounts of money on television rights fees as they compete with the influx of new sports channels like FS1, NBCSN, CBSSN.

The question that's been asked is how long can the costs of live sports go up, and and perhaps we're seeing an answer as reports are that ESPN has been asked by Disney to make significant cuts to their upcoming budgets (although ESPN says the numbers reported below are incorret).

ESPN president John Skipper has been given a mandate to cut $100 million from the network's budget next year and to cut $250 million in 2017. ESPN says those numbers are "factually incorrect."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/keith-olbermann-espn-part-ways-807458

And they're not the only ones reportedly tasked with cutting costs, as Fox Sports 1 also made cuts recently:

Awful Announcing has learned through multiple sources that Fox Sports 1 is making cuts to its news operation. The news updates that regularly air on Fox Sports 1 during commercial breaks will be folded into the At the Buzzer online brand and most significantly, some personnel at the newsdesk and producers will be let go.

We’ve also learned that Fox Sports 1 is planning on cutting back on live reporting for events it doesn’t have the rights to air and pundits and reporters will be doing much less traveling as a part of these moves

http://awfulannouncing.com/2015/fox-sports-1-is-cutting-back-its-television-news-operation.html

So far, most of the cost have been more to on-air talent, news, reporting, and not actual sports programming, but that may not be out of the question if the number of cable subscribers continues to go down.

All told, this is a very intersting time for the PBC to go looking for expensive network deal(s).

[BWC]

LMFAO at "Journalist" Nicole Duva is Kathy Duva Daughter all she post is negative PBC stuff because PBC bumped her month from NBC...Just Saying

But yeah the number could have been better but again stiff competition with the UFC having bigger match ups like Lawler vs McDonald and of course McGregor who has a huge buzz right now. UFC>Boxing in the US right now overall and it is not even debatable so Boxing has work to do. Doesn't help the sport either when so called "Boxing Fans" are even rooting against their own sport

UFC is in no way bigger than boxing. The combined US audience for boxing dwarfs the UFC audience..

[bigdunny1]

If you read the tea leaves this is going to end bad for PBC. They are simply spending too much money for a bad product. They are over spending and outbidding themselves for fight purses. I get it they are overpaying to try and lure away talent from other promoters to stomp out the competition and once they do that they have all the talent and can readjust/lower the price and purses. But in the meantime that means these events are super expensive. But they have rank armatures running it. For example for half the budget HBO puts out a far superior looking program. So you have something with insane costs but still comes off as cheap and poorly executed. PBC has had multiple fights where a guy gets knocked down and they can't even que up the knockdown after the round or show you a crappy camera angle of the knockdown and you have to wait 2-3 rounds later in the fight to finally see the knockdown or a proper angle. They can't even get you punch stats after a round. Simple things like this that HBO, Showtime handles flawless.

Also can anyone actually say that the PBC brand is growing? I can't if anything it's under fire with tons of criticism from fans and media. The tv ratings prove that a lot of casual fans tuned in at first because it was new/unknown and since then they are leaving not coming back to see it again. Lawsuit are mounting which question whether what Haymon is doing is even legal. Haymon banned tons of long standing boxing media members from his events. That's right many top boxing writers are not even granted press passes to PBC events because they have written or said something critical about Haymon's practices so they aren't allowed. Imagine any other major sporting league where if somebody writes something critical is barred from covering the event. In a short time there is a lot of negativity surrounding PBC and that plus all these mismatches and the poor quality of the production hurts the PBC brand.

The end game I see is PBC cutting a large check to settle the lawsuits and that combined with all the money they are losing forcing them to close up shop. They just can't keep throwing money away at this rate for too long

[Scipio2009]

Once Floyd is gone I dont see any names in Haymons roster that would propel PBC to new heights. Not to mention Floyd doesnt even fight on PBC. You can only recycle fighters like Danny Garcia, Amir Khan, Keith Thurman but only so many times before it becomes stale. Wilder could draw some interest depending on who he fights.

Haymon has a very large stable of fighters but less than a handful have name recognition and are known amongst casuals.

Deontay Wilder

He wins his fight in September, beats Povetkin December/January 2016, and then faces of with Wladimir Klitscko Kentucky Derby weekend and PBC has a superstar (Wilder keeps as busy as possible, though his fights would likely on be broadcast primetime NBC/CBS/ABC or on Showtime).

Beyond him, and this point doesn't get enough rift, the national exposure that these fighters are getting through PBC is building them into bigger stars in their own home regions. The more chances that people get to see fights, the more likely that folks find fighters to rally behind and follow.