MMA Junkie reports that Bellator has brokered a deal with Fox Sports Latin America. The international deal grants the promotion access to 50 million homes in 19 Latin American countries including Brazil.
The partnership will begin with Bellator’s first PPV broadcast November 2nd: “Bellator MMA: Rampage vs. Ortiz.” The deal includes 15 live events in 20115 and “in-territory live events on Fox Sport and the online authenticated platform FoxSportsPlay.com.”
Via MMA Junkie:
“FOX Sports Latin America has been looking for the premier mixed martial arts organization to partner with, and Bellator is the perfect fit,” Carlos Martinez, president of FOX International Channels Latin America stated. “We are thrilled to make Bellator the widest distributed MMA promotion in Latin America and Brazil, reaching more than 50 million homes from day one.
“We are also very excited to be able to work as partners with Bellator to produce large scale Bellator events throughout Latin America and to produce reality shows in key territories. This partnership is a long term relationship that has virtually unlimited potential.”
Payout Perspective:
This is a good move by Bellator and shows that the promotion is thinking of global expansion as it is attempting to make inroads into the important Latin American market. You can say that it is following the UFC road map although this deal is smaller in scale than the one brokered by Zuffa in Latin America earlier this year. What will be interesting is to see if Bellator will try to use the reality show model of getting exposure for its promotion in the new market. How receptive will audiences be to “Fight Master”? In addition to the Fox Sports Latin America deal, it recently added the Armed Forces Network as a distributor. We shall see with this growth how receptive MMA fans will be for its product.
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Bellator is really making some moves as of late. viacom was a godsend otherwise zuffa would gobble them up. just to throw it out there i pray that fox doesn’t buy bellator and ufc. that would be more than i could stand.
Has anyone info about how much money these foreign TV deals brings for organization? We know how much FOX is paying for UFC in their deal, but we never ever see any numbers when discussing foreign deals.
Is it about thousands, tenth thousands, hundred thousands, milions per year?
(because when UFC says, that it is accesible in TV in 100 countries, how much money that really makes them – in comparsion with PPVs/FOX deal/ticket revenues?)
Can one deal with Fox Sports LA cost enough, that it will provide Bellator financial freedom? (I think that Bellator is not really in red numbers now, but also probably doesn’t have cash to spare)