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Dana White answers a reporter’s questions about UFC 100 on UK TV
By Zach Arnold | July 9, 2009
Steve Cofield has the audio and here’s the transcription:
Reporter: “Dana, you know about the UFC.com is streaming live to England?”
Dana White: “Yeah, and we’re on the channel 433.”
Reporter: “But some people don’t have Sky so can you assure them…”
Dana White: “I know, you know what, I’m getting Twittered by people fucking that want to murder me in England because of this. Do you think that we don’t want to be on the biggest platform we could possibly be in to show UFC 100 live? You know, like I say, for us to navigate and do our business in these hard economic times it’s crazy, you know, the network that we’re in business with goes out of business. What the hell am I going to do? I mean, what do I do? If you don’t think we’ve been working our asses off trying to get this thing on a great platform and we were this close to getting a good one and just didn’t work out.”
Reporter: “Are you worried that the stream is not going to be good enough?”
Dana White: “There’s nothing that I can, there’s nothing, I’ve… we have done everything that we could absolutely do to make this happen for the UK fans. Listen, for any UK fan to be pissed at me about UFC 100, I have battled and fought and done everything I can to bring MMA to the UK. And, the UFC. I mean, I was fucking getting my ass kicked over there, I was losing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars going over there, my first time in there I spent probably fucking $8 million dollars more than I should have on marketing, I mean I have done everything that I can do for MMA in the UK.”
Reporter: “And you’re not going away.”
Dana White: “Exactly, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to figure this thing out, we’re going to keep battling over there until we figure this thing out. We’re in the UK to stay and it sucks and I’m sorry that we can’t have a better platform you know to be on, the one that would make everybody happy but I’m trying.”
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, UK, Zach Arnold | 26 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Keep trying old pal, and never give up.
Thanks for transcribing!
I find this hilarious. He’s tried to play hard ball with UK TV stations and failed miserably. He’s ended up paying to effectively set up a temporary UFC TV station for 7 hours. I repeat he’s paid to show UFC in the UK. He won’t even get an official rating to show off to execs who are looking to buy the long term rights.
I imagine stations with much greater reach (Virgin1 springs to mind) were asking for it for free with some costs paid to show it live but he didn’t want to give in. Has the man never heard of a loss leader! Build the biggest audience for UFC100 possible to make the long term deal worth more. Simples.
So instead he puts it on a dead TV channel (used to be a racing channel!) frequency available to about a third of the potential audience of Virgin, with 3 days notice, without any network advertising support, and HE PAYS FOR THE THAT!!!
To counterbalance the fury of UK fans he’s also putting up a free live stream in the uk that would I assume be easily accessed by pirates in the US using proxis. But most of the UK UFC casual fans aren’t internet geeks and have no interest in watching a laptop at 3am in the morning while fueled by alcohol etc. Funnily enough it’s a social sport like boxing in the UK.
They were on the verge of a cultural breakthrough amongst young blokes in the UK (the casual interest is huge after TUF was on Virgin) and instead they’ve alienated a huge percentage of the fan base. The expansion in the fanbase would have been worth a lot more in the long term than the $8m Dana wasted putting up huge billboards and posters on the tube in London.
My god they’ve screwed themselves.
P.S. Me and my mate who will be watching can get it no problem. I’m just enjoying the WCW -like business sense UFC have sudddenly developed out of nowhere.
Once you give something away for free, it is much harder to turn around and ten demand money for it.
I dot understand the negative words towards the UFC on this one. Trying to make an international last minute TV deal in a foreign country isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do.
They don’t do PPVs in the UK, so that’s not really an issue.
“He’s tried to play hard ball with UK TV stations and failed miserably.”
How do you know that? Ohh wait… “you imagine…”…
This broadcast will be FTA for satellite customers, and thus available to considerably more people than the events on Setanta were.
Is it ideal? Hell no, not even nearly. But blasting the lack of business sense without having any notion of what negotiations took place is rather silly, don’t you think?
Avoiding any semantic mires…
“available”… is kind of ambiguous there. I mean viewable by a larger number of people as things currently stand, ie Sky customers, or anyone with a dish & digibox, compared to the ~1m Setanta subscribers.
I realise that equally, not being on the FV or VM platform means it’s “available” to fewer, but not many availed themselves of that availability…….
I don’t think Dana is the one playing hardball.
I suspect the hangup was that the networks knew the UFC was over a barrel and were trying to get a discounted long-term contract in return for broadcasting UFC 100. Zuffa decided they would rather cobble together this band-aid solution rather than negotiate from such a weak position.
Bigger stories then this one:
1. UFC is the lead story on ESPN.com
2. UFC has new TV deal in China.
3. UFC is on in Mexico now.
What happened in the UK is a bump in the road. In no way is it a failure. Setanta is the failure here. The UFC likely did the best they could under the circumstances.
The UFC has run shows in the UK and spent millions on promoting there. I’d call being shunted to a nonexistent channel after the last couple months of chaos a lot more important than a second rate FTA deal in China that doesn’t even reach the major cities there. Its up there with M-1 Challenge being on satellite TV in subsaharan Africa, for sure.
45 Huddle – “I dot understand the negative words towards the UFC on this one. Trying to make an international last minute TV deal in a foreign country isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do.”
Virgin 1, Five, Bravo, Sky Sports and ESPN all had both short and long term offers on the table to air UFC 100 for the last two weeks. Marshall Zelanik even confirmed they had two offers from two big stations that they could have signed last week if they wanted to.
None of them offered to pay as much as Setenta did for the rights though. Which makes sense. The key reason Setenta went out of business was because they overpaid for sports rights.
It’s funny how UFC tries to copy WWE’s business model for international expansion yet tries so hard to avoid getting the same type of television deal the WWE has in the UK.
I agree with Steve4192 – The UFC are not going to sign any deal that doesn’t benefit them long term. If a deal isn’t agreed in time for 101, the same scenario will probably repeat.
They’ve gotta appease the masses, and I’m positive SKY is the biggest platform to build on. Is setanta even available on Virgin or the other TV providers? I mean, how else could UFC be viewed from if you don’t have SKY? (I’m from Ireland so I’m not sure).
They’ve gotta appease the masses, and I’m positive SKY is the biggest platform to build on. Is setanta even available on Virgin or the other TV providers? I mean, how else could UFC be viewed from if you don’t have SKY? (I’m from Ireland so I’m not sure).
Apparently they’ll still be on Setanta in Ireland, so if you’ve got a set top box for them, you’re set. Otherwise, you can watch a stream of the event online. Seriously.
Just because deals are on the table, doesn’t mean they are good deals. People bashed Zuffa for not getting on HBO or Network TV. And so far, Zuffa has looked to be smart on not taking those deals.
It amazes me how much work Fertitta puts into making the UFC an international company, and any sort of issues, people crap on them immediately. The guy obviously has a gameplan to where he wants to take the company long term. And I think it is obvious through Network TV, HBO, and now the UK Deal…. That they are completely unwilling to have small short term gains at the expense of the long term growth.
Do you think the UFC is waiting for ESPN in the UK to launch to sign a deal with them? When does ESPN in UK launch anyway?
“Just because deals are on the table, doesn’t mean they are good deals. People bashed Zuffa for not getting on HBO or Network TV. And so far, Zuffa has looked to be smart on not taking those deals.”
Virgin 1 and Bravo were both willing to sign a one event deal for UFC 100. They weren’t asking for a say in production like HBO. Maybe the money wasn’t enough to be profitable but at least their losses for the event would have been slightly subsidised by the TV deal.
Instead UFC decided to play hard ball despite having no leverage and the TV stations didn’t bite. Now UFC are reduced into paying out of their own pocket to obtain a TV slot on a D-grade station.
The channel UFC are paying to broadcast on are so low rent they don’t even subscribe to BARB (the UK equivalent of Nielsen). Therefore they will have no way of knowing how many people will have watched UFC 100 and can’t use the figures as negotiating leverage for a long term deal post UFC 100.
The UK is full of stupid people just like every other country. Those moaning about this deal are just proof of it.
To those who don’t have the internet, or even the most basic Sky package, how on earth do you follow UFC regularly anyway?
Instead UFC decided to play hard ball despite having no leverage and the TV stations didn’t bite. Now UFC are reduced into paying out of their own pocket to obtain a TV slot on a D-grade station.
Poor UFC having to pay for someone to broadcast their shows, with idiotic business moves like that they’ll never make it big.
Oh wait they’ve done that before and been fine, I love how desperate people have become to bash anything that the UFC does regardless of how important it is to the future of mma.
When the Setanta deal was signed in the first place, the Wrestling Observer reported at the time, based on speaking to Zuffa executives, that they had a bigger-money offer from Sky TV, but instead they took the smaller-money offer from the smaller TV network because they felt there would be great advantages to being the centerpiece of the network, much like they are the centerpiece of Spike TV in the United States. It’s not a bad strategy in theory, but it didn’t work out with Setanta going out of business.
I don’t have a good grip on the TV market in the UK, but the view from my chair says that the TV situation is a lot more splintered over there than here, and possibly a larger portion of the population continues to rely on OTA than the US (IIRC, there are about 10m households in the US, mainly younger urban people who still have only OTA, and lots don’t watch much or any TV anyway).
What are your other options? You’ve certainly got bars, do the bars have satellite TV?
Is direct to digital theater distribution feasible (have you got live digital theater distribution infrastructure in the UK)? The groundwork for that would be pretty extensive but you might be able to charge decent amounts per head. Problem is you have to organize every local area and you’re competing with the bars.
Maybe there’s no good option there aside from taking what you can get for the nearest thing to OTA you can get.
“What are your other options? You’ve certainly got bars, do the bars have satellite TV?”
Yes but other that sports specific bars I aint convinced normal bars would have much interest staying open for a UFC event. This sort of thing happens when there is a big fight happening on the side of the pond. i.e. Ricky Hatton fight which appeals to the casual fan.
“Is direct to digital theater distribution feasible (have you got live digital theater distribution infrastructure in the UK)?”
This doesnt happen over here.
“The UK is full of stupid people just like every other country. Those moaning about this deal are just proof of it.
To those who don’t have the internet, or even the most basic Sky package, how on earth do you follow UFC regularly anyway?”
You don’t need Sky to watch UFC. I understand American fans thinking us Brits are being petty about this, but then you don’t have a problem here. Are you telling me there wouldn’t be an outcry if 100 was only availible online or on a niche station nobody gets all of a sudden? How does that make the people who complain stupid?
The UFC was on Setanta, which costed about £10 per month on top of your Sky pagage. Virgin Media gives Setanta away for free. You can also get the Sky Sports pakage on Virgin Media. Given the choice, many people go with Virgin for this reason, as it means they pay less overall for their Football (the reason most people have Setanta/sports packages.
The fact is, they could have been more honest. If they knew they were going to have trouble getting it on a station available to the majority of people, they should have announced the fact a week ago.
If Spike TV went off the air two weeks before the TUF finale, that they would put in on a station that about 25% of people in the States could view?
The really annoying thing is that Racing World (the station that UFC 100 is on) is owned by Racing UK, which is available on all platforms!! It makes no sense.
People have every right to be annoyed. Its not a money issue because they are giving it away anyway. This isn’t just a fight night, it’s their bigest event ever. There was little to no official word from the UFC on the matter until yesterday morning, giving the majority of UK fans no time to make arangements.
We’re not all computer geeks who are happy to sit in a dark room with a laptop at 3am to watch this. Unfortunatelly not everyone has the ability to hook up a computer to a TV, or a fast enough internet connection to stream video. These are the people who have been shafted.
“What are your other options? You’ve certainly got bars, do the bars have satellite TV?”
Unfortunatelly most bars are not open till 6am Sunday morning. Even Sports Cafe, a god-awfull ‘American sports bar’ themed thing isn’t showing it.
I doubt any pubs and bars would be willing to stay open and pay staff till 6am for a handfull of UFC fans – also with licencing laws they would not be able to serve alcohol.
What brashleyholland said.
Bandido, Fair point so let me expand. I’ve been told by two people UFC were offered the timeslot for free plus some live running costs. They tried to get fees from people and failed.
I agree with you it will be FTA far more than Satanta. But getting a form that isn’t availbel to Virgin media is throwing away hundred of thousends of people who will probably neve come back to UFC. I think that’s a shit move.
UFC UK president talking about working with two channels in the future..
maybe Bravo/virgin European events, Sky US events? Wonder which two channels he is talking about??
http://video.telegraph.co.uk/service…id=29120654001
I’m surprised that you can’t find a bar that will stay open on the overnight for you.
Happens routinely here for big events, they can’t sell to you during the close period, but they can sell you a bottle before they close. Happened more in Chicago where they really only had to close for a couple hours a night, but I’ve heard of it here in Boston as well.
Jeremy bars will stay open overnight for big boxing fights involving british fighters but would be very hard pushed to find one for a UFC event.
“I’m surprised that you can’t find a bar that will stay open on the overnight for you.
Happens routinely here for big events, they can’t sell to you during the close period, but they can sell you a bottle before they close. Happened more in Chicago where they really only had to close for a couple hours a night, but I’ve heard of it here in Boston as well.”
The trouble is, in the UK we have whats called ‘drinking up time’, basically a short window of time after last orders (the time at which the establishment’s licence to serve alcohol expires) in which all purchaced drinks must be consumed. My pool/snooker stays open until 4-5am, however they stop serving at 2 and all drinks are colected by 3am, finished or not.
The country got 24 hour licencing not too long ago, but becuase of the costs involved, most establishments only extended their licence by a couple of hours rather than going for the full 24.
Some, but very, very few, places stay open or re-open for big boxing matches, but they do so as private functions to get around licencing laws. Unfotunatelly MMA is still too niche of a sport for this to happen, especially when you factor in that the UFC was never on PPV, one of the main reasons people go to bars for boxing.
Us Brits like a few pints with a fight, so its unlikely that anyone would be willing to treck to a bar in the middle of the night without the prospect of a couple of jars. Plus, unless a bar is charging an enterance fee to watch the event (which is illigal) then how do they justify paying staff etc when they wont be making money behind the bar?
It all just comes down to bad timing. If this was UFC 99, I doubt there would be as much of an upoar.
As gutted as I am and as dissappointed with the UFC as I am, there is nothing that complaining will fix.
To all those people saying they will never give the UFC money or that the UFC will lose viewers over this…thats just an immature reaction and it’s just not going to happen. If you really decide never to watch the UFC again because of this, then wow, talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face!