Significance of Bellator Fighting Championships Fall Preview Video & Prelims on Spike.com

Before Bellator’s fifth season kicks off on MTV 2 this Saturday, Spike.com “takes an in-depth look at the stories and personalities that drive Bellator Fighting Championships”.

Payout Perspective:

As you can see from the video, Spike and Bellator continue to grow their partnership as Spike continues to slowly integrate the Bellator brand on to the network. This is a great promotional video, and was done in a manner where it is Spike TV ready, as you can see with the placement of the Spike brand on the bottom left.

These videos by Bellator are great  promotional tools that do a great job of introducing their fighters to new audiences by telling individual stories from their fighters.  In this case, the goal is to convert as many viewers of Spike/Spike.com as possible to tune in and watch Bellator when they slide in and take over the UFC slot, as most assume is a foregone conclusion at this point.

If that wasn’t enough of an indicator, Spike and Bellator announced the streaming of Bellator prelims on Spike.com yesterday. There was also been cross-promotional efforts between MTV 2 and Spike in recent months and that will continue this week as Bellator’s LW champion Eddie Alvarez is booked to appear on Spike’s TNA’s Impact this week, pushing the opening of the new Bellator season.  It is said that Spike TV executives were with Alvarez the entire time according to F4WOnline.com.  “It should be noted Joe Warren was on TNA in the past, the Bellator was plugging TNA even on MTV 2, virtually every week last season”.

There is a cat-and-mouse game being played right now by Spike and the UFC. Ariel Helwani of NBC Sports details the interesting situation regarding the UFC Library rights Spike has until 2012:

“Spike TV announced on Tuesday that Spike.com will air Bellator’s season five prelims beginning with Saturday’s event in Atlantic City, N.J. This seems to be another indication that Bellator will soon make its way over from MTV2 to Spike. However, since Spike owns the rights to the UFC library in 2012, the network can’t televise another promotion for that entire year. That is unless the UFC buys the library back, which would then nullify the deal. According to sources, Spike is willing to part with the library for the right price to expedite the process of getting Bellator on its network. If not, expect Spike to air UFC programming at the same [time] as live UFC events on the FOX Sports family of networks.”