UFC established itself as "arguably the fastest growing sport in the country" under the leadership of former Chair & CEO Lorenzo Fertitta and President Dana White, and their new deal with WME-IMG "will give UFC the muscle to expand its media and promotional footprint to even greater heights," according to a cover-story Q&A by R. Thomas Umstead of MULTICHANNEL NEWS. Below are excerpts from the Q&A, some of which have been edited for brevity.
Q: Was the UFC’s appeal to younger viewers the catalyst for you guys to finally break through and secure a major television deal with Fox Sports?
Fertitta: Our success that we had on Spike led to other, traditional sports broadcasters to want to carry our product. ... The fact that millennials are really attracted to our product, one of the things that we embraced early on was making sure that we had a digital strategy and making sure that we provided our product on every platform possible, whether it was traditional pay-per-view, basic cable TV, now free-to-air broadcast, as well as ... an OTT product in Fight Pass.
Q: Do you see in the future the opportunity to fully develop a robust OTT service where you’re offering exclusive content to your fans on the Web, much as WWE has done with WWE Network?
Fertitta: We look at it as an additive to all of our strategies from a distribution standpoint. So while WWE has been very successful in putting all of their primary content over the top ... we have taken a little bit of a different route. We like continuing to have a valuable pay-per-view franchise, which we are obviously going to continue on with. We also like having our deal with Fox Sports where we are getting license fees on both basic-cable and broadcast television and we like providing product on an OTT platform.
Q: The Fox deal comes up at the end of '18. Are you already thinking about what the next step is for the organization?
Fertitta: One of the big benefits that we have is that there are no major sports rights coming up over the next five years, so the UFC is essentially the only major sports platform that is going to be available for the various media companies here in the U.S. to be able to bid on. And I think that puts the UFC in a great position.
Q: Do you see the UFC continuing to be on the cutting edge of new technologies as we go along?
Fertitta: Absolutely. A lot of times, whether it was the early days of digital, whether it was OTT or whatever, we just always wanted to be on the forefront. We are risk-takers and now we’re broadcasting in 4K and we’re working with some different VR companies. And if the opportunity presents itself, I would expect that we will be on the forefront of that relative to sports (MULTICHANNEL NEWS, 8/22 issue).
