The Sports Business Journal reports on the return to the ring of NBC on the rebranded NBC Sports Network formerly known as Versus. Saturday night is the debut of “NBC Sports Network Fight Night,” which will appear quarterly in 2012 on the network.
NBCSN will work with Main Events as its promotional company to produce quality fights. It already has had an obstacle to overcome as its original main event was scrapped due to fighter injury. Main Events replaced the main event with a match between two unknown, but unbeaten heavyweights.
The pledge by Main Events is that it will put on competitive fights and will work with other promoters to achieve this goal.
According to boxing sources, rights fees will average $150,000 per show which, according to the SBJ, wil “fill a middle-class void that exists between ESPN and the premium cable networks.”
With the Comcast-NBC merger, past hurdles in developing fighters and having them move on to HBO, Showtime and PPV are no longer. Main Events CEO Kathy Duva told Sports Business Journal that if fighters leave for premium cable, Comcast still wins. Also, if fighters become PPV stars, Comcast wins too.
The two hour program will debut Saturday night at 6pmPT/9pmET. It will air from the old ECW Arena in Philadelphia.
GoDaddy.com has signed on as a sponsor for the show.
Payout Perspective:
It will be interesting to see how this show will be received. The Fight Night follows NBCSN’s strategy of live programming being central to its sports network. Its an interesting concept by Main Events and addresses a problem that is common in the boxing industry. As we’ve seen with Mayweather-Pacquiao, the problems of promoters working with each other prohibits good match-ups. We’ll see how the show will present compelling storylines and promote fighters.
There was an article on this fight card in the Phila newspaper (inquirer) although I do not remember if the article mentioned it would be on TV. Not that i would have watched low level boxing anyway, I was watching HdNet’s Pro-Elite card. $150 thousand for the entire fight card (including promoter) is not much money, so I am sure NBC will not need much in the way of ratings to make this a success.
For Pro-Elite, I am not sure what plant Stratus Media has to make this one of the “elite MMA organizations within the next 6 months”, but 1 good main event and a decent c0-main event won’t do that, but can keep them in the landscape with the Titan FC and MFC’s of the world. Which is fine by me if they do 4-5 cards per year of similar quality.