Arum on the future of PPV, HBO and Turner Sports

[Mitchell Kane]

From Lance Pugmire of the LA Times:

Promoter says boxing pay-per-views will become few and far between

After last week’s proposed $85-billion*purchase of HBO’s parent company Time Warner by AT&T, Arum said he’s come to theorize that the landscape for televising big fights will change.

“There’s no reason for [premium cable providers] to be in the pay-per-view business,” Arum said. “They don’t make any money to speak of in pay-per-view. When you add in the staffing expenses, it’s not a profit center.

“Take a good 500,000-buy pay-per-view. They make $1.25 million and pay a [replay] delay [cost] of $750,000. When you take into account the expenses —*travel, hotels —*if they make $250,000, it’s a lot of money. It’s not worth it; $250,000 is nothing. So I believe pay-per-view will be left to promoters, or a company who can do it. … There’s no real role for a premium network to do pay-per-view anymore.”

As Arum’s awareness of the television business has increased, he speculates the proposed AT&T purchase of Time Warner will boost Turner Sports’ standing in the fight game.

“My theory is Turner Sports will handle all sports activities for the new company, including HBO, with just three, four major fights on HBO and Turner [functioning] like ESPN to ABC.

“If [AT&T] feels boxing is important, fights that would be on [HBO’s secondary boxing show] ‘Boxing After Dark,’ and other activities, will be on Turner, and they’ll be out of the pay-per-view business,” Arum said.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/boxing...103-story.html

[Dip_Slide]

With the absence of captivating/interesting/controversial characters in boxing, with boxers not willing to make any sacrifices to become stars, with networks, promotoers and manager not working with each others and with fighters fighting once or twice a year while being completely irrelevant to the casual fans inbetween their fights (which leads to them being forgotten about), the PPV business was bound to fail and to fail miserable especially with the rise of the UFC.

Al Haymon's PBC model is imo the only way for boxing to survive at the moment, however if they keep handling business the way they've been handling business so far I don't see how they should expect an improvement in viewership due to the same reasons I mentioned above.

[Redd Foxx]

With the absence of captivating/interesting/controversial characters in boxing, with boxers not willing to make any sacrifices to become stars, with networks, promotoers and manager not working with each others and with fighters fighting once or twice a year while being completely irrelevant to the casual fans inbetween their fights (which leads to them being forgotten about), the PPV business was bound to fail and to fail miserable especially with the rise of the UFC.

Al Haymon's PBC model is imo the only way for boxing to survive at the moment, however if they keep handling business the way they've been handling business so far I don't see how they should expect an improvement in viewership due to the same reasons I mentioned above.

I think the star issue is a big problem. I love fighters like Ward, Kovalev, Crawford, Postol, but they aren't doing the character thing that sells fights.
And, guys like Golovkin, Canelo, etc aren't taking risks right now.
And, you have a character like Fury who imploded. Ortiz can't get good fights.
We need larger than life boxers fighting each other again.

[Dip_Slide]

I think the star issue is a big problem. I love fighters like Ward, Kovalev, Crawford, Postol, but they aren't doing the character thing that sells fights.
And, guys like Golovkin, Canelo, etc aren't taking risks right now.
And, you have a character like Fury who imploded. Ortiz can't get good fights.
We need larger than life boxers fighting each other again.

The fighters that used to fight on the Mayweather undercards or were associated with Showtime at the time when Floyd was making showtime the premier network are blowing their chance big time, guys like Garcia and Thurman for example, these guys got a lot of exposure and they had a lot of hype behind them at the time, however once they made a bit of money they started becoming increasingly inactive and irrelevant, how many articles or interviews do we see these guys get mentioned in? we don't hear a damn thing about these kids for 4-6 months at a time sometimes, these were supposed to be the ones to carry the sport but I don't know what the hell happened.

Then you got the HBO guys u mentioned like Ward, Kovalev, Crawford, GGG and Lomachenko, who are all superb fighters, however none of them has any kind of charisma or appeal to the casuals and HBO's way of promoting them sucks major balls! people want a bit of controversy, a bit of animation, I was watching the 24/7 episodes of Mayweather vs Hatton last night and I was like what the hell happened to promoting fights like this? You don't have to be a boxing fan to enjoy watching that ****, that was pure entertainment which is what the casuals are looking for, that school of promoting died and boxing has suffered since then. Only 1 fighter has to be controversial/ animated and all the fighters associated with him (fighting at or near his weight class) will get publicity too, like Pacquiao and Mayweather for instance.