« Tuesday chalkboard: In their own words | Home | Report: Drwal vs. Heath booked for UFC 81 »
Reports: IFL, HDNet finalize TV deal
By Zach Arnold | December 4, 2007

During the early hours on Tuesday morning, Sam Caplan reported that a TV deal between the IFL and HDNet to broadcast the promotion’s 12/29 Mohegan Sun Arena event was being completed.
MediaPost Publications, in a report two hours ago, confirmed the story.
Topics: HDNet, IFL, Media, MMA, Zach Arnold | 6 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Good for the IFL. Its a nice tie in with Bas Rutten. What is the current outlook of the IFL, outside of what the chiefs of the IFL say?
So…what does this mean for HDNet and their MMA organization?
It’s a one shot. This fits in exactly with the HDNet Fights strategy, to team with actual promotions to produce content for HDNet.
It’s interesting that they apparently had a loophole in their My Network TV / Fox Sports Net contract…
Or maybe they don’t, and this will come back to bite them.
My first thought was, “All right, I can watch the event now!”
Unfortunately, my second was “Oh yeah, I don’t have HDNet and can’t get it… crap…”
Still, good news for all the HDTV owning MMA fans.
Good news for the IFL but how big is this really?
From my understanding hdnet is a very small channel.. Does anyone know how many viewers they reach?
I get HDNet. It’s nice, but I prefer HDNet Movies and Universal HD.
It’s on DISH (parents have it, I’m not impressed), DirecTV (had it liked it, moved, and now have no LOS), FIOS (have it, it’s awesome, go buy it), any decent cable operator (ha ha, joke). The problem isn’t so much distribution at this point as people just either not having HDTVs or not having the sense to seek out HD programming for their new HDTVs.
The latter is going to be an increasing problem going forward, I think.