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by David P. Greisman - The boxing world is both bigger and smaller. The television networks deserve both credit and blame.
After all, it wasn’t too long ago that they were nearly all of what we had. It wasn’t too long ago that it required much more effort to be a boxing addict. We took what we could get, how we could get it and when we could get it.
That’s why I once spent a summer evening following the exciting war between Edwin Valero and Vicente Mosquera — not watching it live, but listening to a streaming audio broadcast and reading round-by-round recaps on a website’s message board. I wouldn’t actually see it until days later, when an illicit boxing video website offered the ability to download the bout.
We had to turn to the Internet, which became a lawless Wild West for boxing fans to thrive via piracy, all due to what the networks and promoters were not doing. They were not putting their libraries of fights online, nor were they marketing to the masses, not when they could make more money by putting far too many events on pay-per-view.
The Internet is far faster and much vaster than it was just six years ago. Now we don’t need to wait for someone, somewhere, to upload a file that could take hours to get onto our own computer. Now we can watch strawweight title fights airing from Japan, cruiserweight bouts emanating out of Australia, and everything from the earliest preliminary bouts to the main event in Germany and Great Britain. Now we can do this live on websites legal and otherwise. [Click Here To Read More]
After all, it wasn’t too long ago that they were nearly all of what we had. It wasn’t too long ago that it required much more effort to be a boxing addict. We took what we could get, how we could get it and when we could get it.
That’s why I once spent a summer evening following the exciting war between Edwin Valero and Vicente Mosquera — not watching it live, but listening to a streaming audio broadcast and reading round-by-round recaps on a website’s message board. I wouldn’t actually see it until days later, when an illicit boxing video website offered the ability to download the bout.
We had to turn to the Internet, which became a lawless Wild West for boxing fans to thrive via piracy, all due to what the networks and promoters were not doing. They were not putting their libraries of fights online, nor were they marketing to the masses, not when they could make more money by putting far too many events on pay-per-view.
The Internet is far faster and much vaster than it was just six years ago. Now we don’t need to wait for someone, somewhere, to upload a file that could take hours to get onto our own computer. Now we can watch strawweight title fights airing from Japan, cruiserweight bouts emanating out of Australia, and everything from the earliest preliminary bouts to the main event in Germany and Great Britain. Now we can do this live on websites legal and otherwise. [Click Here To Read More]
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