Is the UFC headed to Netflix after its present take care of ESPN expires?
On January 6, World Wrestling Leisure will make its long-awaited debut on the streaming big, taking its flagship exhibit cable tv for the primary time since its inception greater than 30 years in the past. In early 2024, the sports activities leisure group revealed that that they had signed an enormous $5 billion deal to deliver Monday Night time RAW to Netflix for the following 10 years.
With the UFC’s take care of ESPN set to expire on the finish of 2025, may we see Dana White and Co. comply with go well with and produce their product to the world’s largest streaming service?
It’s definitely potential in response to MMA Preventing’s Damon Martin. In a latest submit on X, the revered fight sports activities journalist provided some perception from business insiders who strongly imagine that the UFC will be part of its enterprise brother on Netflix in 2026.
“Lots of business people appear to imagine Netflix is the main candidate to land a minimum of a part of the UFC’s broadcast rights after 2025,” Martin wrote. “Subsequent 12 months is gonna be very huge for the UFC.”
In 2024, Endeavor—the UFC’s mother or father firm—bought World Wrestling Leisure for $9.3 billion earlier than merging the 2 organizations below one company banner, TKO Group Holdings.
Netflix’s First Foray into Fight Sports activities Leaves Combat Followers Annoyed
Whereas Netflix’s first dive into the world of stay fight sports activities rendered huge outcomes for the corporate, it left numerous battle followers pissed off.
In November, Netflix was the unique residence to a boxing match between former heavyweight world champion ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson and YouTube star Jake Paul.
Whereas Netflix knew the battle would generate huge numbers, it’s protected to say that the viewers they drew exceeded all expectations in addition to their bandwidth.
In keeping with reviews, greater than 65 million folks live-streamed the generational conflict concurrently. Sadly, hundreds of households had been left scrambling to observe the battle by means of various sources after the streaming web site crashed through the co-main occasion rematch between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano.
“At any time when we do stay occasions, we would like it to go easily for each single considered one of our members,” Netflix chief content material officer Bela Bajaria mentioned throughout a press occasion on Wednesday. “That’s actually essential—additionally, to place it in perspective, it was 65 million concurrent streams, proper? It was a really profitable evening. Lots of people [watched], the dimensions was very huge, which is nice. There’s numerous curiosity in it.”
In fact, WWE’s chief content material officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque will fortunately look previous a number of bugs within the system if it means getting 60 million followers to tune into RAW each week.
“I’ll simply say, if it blinks a few instances and we do 60 million, I’m good with that,” Levesque mentioned with fun.
