PBC up for sale & Showtime about to pull the plug on boxing.

[bigjavi973]

Premier Boxing Champions For Sale

As noted on Friday (5.18), the prevailing thought amongst boxing insiders is that it was Al Haymon who invested at least $10M into last night’s Wilder-Breazeale fight to keep Deontay on his side of the street. The belief is that Premier Boxing Champions is for sale (or that Haymon is raising capital) and that he needs the heavyweight champion to pull down the highest multiple. There’s been speculation that Endeavor would have interest in PBC, but that seems unlikely. As one boxing insider told us “Haymon’s fighters may not fight often, but he’s paid them through the roof; Endeavor is not going to buy something with a model diametrically opposed to their MMA business.” FYI:Nearly half (41%) of the UFC’s +/- 500 fighters earn less than $45,000/year.

Showtime Boxing On The Ropes

HBO’s decision to exit the boxing business left Showtime as the sole premium cable channel invested in the sport, but whispers that they too are on bought time are getting louder and as one industry insider told us “at some point somebody above Stephen Espinoza is going to pull the plug because it doesn’t make sense to be spending $30 million, $40 million, $50 million/year on a sport and sit third on the totem pole (behind ESPN & DAZN). I don’t believe a lot of subscribers would turn off Showtime if they stopped doing boxing.”

The ratings from last night’s (5.18) Wilder-Breazeale fight (not yet released at time of print) could go a long way towards making that decision for the network. As reported in Friday’s (5.17) newsletter, Showtime is paying a record licensing fee to broadcast the bout. The network needs to draw 1 million viewers for the show to be considered a success; “if it does just 700,000 or 800,000 homes, it’s going to be embarrassing from a business standpoint.”

https://johnwallstreet.com/showtime-...-on-the-ropes/

who is his source?

that he'll never tell so ill take this like a grain of salt

[LacedUp]

Worst business in the world.

Al Haymon is the king of money waste and their brand is nothing really. No one cares about the brand and it if goes away zero percent of the population would care because it's meaningless.

[Dip_Slide]

The PBC/showtime schedule has been very disappointing lately. A ton of great fights could've been made but didn't happen and fighters are seriously losing popularity due to being forgotten about due to extreme inactivity. They're certainly not building stars the right way and not helping their popularity long term by overpaying them for doing nothing while getting little to no exposure.

I was a big supporter of their concept and they delivered some good fights in the past but the inactivity of the fighters is really what's been pissing me off lately.

[john l]

I hate when people use that dumb talk. No sport is above a human being. Don't you see its a tool to enslave the athlete. ALL athletes are bigger than the sport period! No athlete then no sport, duh And B-Hop was robbed against taylor.

IDK what to say about your post???"no athlete no sport"Well no sport no athlete and the sport will be around longer then any one athlete so yes its more important not sure why you cant understand that.Also no robbery I had B-hop by a point I think in 1st that word gets thrown around too much esp by casuals.Which might be the problem here."Duh" who even says that but 13 year old girls smdh.

[MDPopescu]

Those who have some spare time should listen to this:

#Listen: @boxing_esq & @heynottheface talk the PBC being sold rumors, what Endeavor owning the PBC would look like and more. Great stuff from two smart #boxing and #MMA guys. https://t.co/cH5490DVap @LIITRBOXING @LIITRPodcasts @Fistianadospod

— LIITRPodcastNetwork (@LIITRPodcasts) May 20, 2019

[lfc19titles]

This is karma for Haymon for blocking the big fights and putting his pockets first before anything else

[nubianpiye]

So Wilder is really ambling and risking it all alienating DAZN he better hope ESPN snap him up.

[OnlytheTruth]

Isn't it more the case that we will see a single dominant streaming service start to control the way we watch Boxing?

You only need to look at Netflix to see how quickly the rise of streaming services has exploded in the last 8 or 9 years. In Q2 2011, Netflix had 22.93m streamers worldwide. Fast forward to today, Q1 2019 subscriptions are now 148.86m. That's nearly a 550% increase. It's more than double the population of the UK. Its nearly half of the population of the US. Mental numbers.https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ers-worldwide/

Compare this to Amazon Prime Video, figures are projected to be at 64.08 in 2020. Less than half of Netflix.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/693936/global-number-of-amazon-prime-video-subscribers-region/

My point is, I believe that DAZN will continue to grow at the expense of other subscription based channels/services meaning that its just natural evolution of the entertainment industry anyway. So is anyone really that surprised HBO went and SHO will follow soon?

[elfag]

PBC LDBC diehards don’t realize how much of a shake the DAZN model is would achieve. It’s was an unorthodox investment in technology backed by a mogul that has experience with these types of entrepreneurships. Showtime is based on a completely different model. Fox has some hope because of its prestige brand name.

DAZN is new and has a ton of investor money pouring in on the speculation that it will eventually be profitable. I think it will fail, they will spend too much. Cant do it forever.

[SCEN3RY]

No it wouldn't be cool if espn or dazn bought "them" cuz espn & dazn don't want to make the real fights. So far the only real fight dazn has made was Nelo/Jacobs. What real fight has espn done since top rank? PBC is Premier Boxing Champions, now you know.

Poor argument. Fanboy argument in fact. If fighters regularly on pbc produced shows were on other networks OR VICE VERSA, it expands the number of available fights. I don't even know why I had to explain that to you. You know this.

If you said to me, instead, hey scen3ry maybe division is a good thing bc there's more bidders for fighters, so in effect they make more money. That's a valid point. Bc a monopoly does not help fighters. But you didn't want to debate, you just wanted to fanboy.