The subscription streaming service costs about $100 a year and is aimed at hardcore fans of mixed martial arts.
In the spring of 2018, when ESPN outbid Fox Sports for UFC rights to the tune of $300 million per year, several sources told me to keep my eye on the UFC’s streaming service, Fight Pass.
Given the importance Disney was placing on its ESPN+ streaming service, they argued that it was only a matter of time before Fight Pass merged into ESPN+.
One year later, in May 2019, those arguments about the coming demise of Fight Pass got louder. That’s when ESPN signed a deal to have ESPN+ become UFC’s exclusive pay-per-view provider.
Those predictions appear to be dead wrong. The service, which costs about $100 per year, relaunched in December and has seen its subscriber base grow — even during months when live sports were suspended worldwide in the face of the pandemic.
Crowley
When I checked in with UFC’s top executive overseeing Fight Pass earlier this month, Crowley Sullivan, he scoffed at those dire predictions. He cited a statistic saying that the service has seen a 22% growth in subscribers year-to-date.
It’s usually meaningless to offer a percentage growth or decline without any real numbers, and UFC does not make its Fight Pass subscription numbers available. But any increase during a time when Fight Pass had no live events is noteworthy.
“Fight Pass is alive and well and poised to grow even more,” said Sullivan, the streaming service’s vice president and general manager. “We’ve only just started.”
Those rumors of a potential merger with ESPN+ — or even the potential shuttering of Fight Pass — were put to rest in December, when the service relaunched and added more original content. It has become more of what UFC executives call an “experiential network,” designed to be what Crowley describes as a one-stop shop for hardcore fans of mixed martial arts.
“The platform had become antiquated,” Sullivan said. “Now, when the user comes to Fight Pass, he isn’t just coming to a landing page for our prelims. That person is coming to a platform to get the full experience of the combat sports world.”
The service relaunched on the Endeavor Streaming platform, following a redesign that took 18 months to complete. The idea was to have Fight Pass become more than just a place for fights and highlights. It focused on original programming, launching six original series, including documentaries, animated shorts and all-access content. It picked up rights to 60 classic martial arts films, too.
“We’ve spent the last year and a half preparing for whatever opportunity might have presented itself to grow Fight Pass into an experiential network,” Sullivan said. “Original content should be a differentiator for all true media content platforms. If you don’t have an original content strategy, you better figure one out.”
The most surprising stat lies with the subscriber uptick during the last three months. Many of those gains came when live events kicked in again, Sullivan said. But the service’s upward subscriber trend was occurring even before those live events.
“Fans of combat sports were experiencing a real void, and we were there to fill that void,” Sullivan said. “We spent the better part of the last year developing all of this original content and were in a good spot to roll it out as the pandemic was negating everyone’s opportunity to tune into live events.”
Even with all of its original content, Fight Pass still is a live events service, which is what brings in the most subscribers. It has partnerships with around 30 live event promotions. Last year, it had live events on 250 nights — a total of around 1,000 bouts.
“That really helped to demonstrate to the global audience that it’s a place where you can get any and all live events in combat sports,” Sullivan said. “It’s not just one thing that’s contributed to the growth. It’s a holistic evolution and progression that puts us where we are now to be able to point to the reasons why there has been real growth.”
Some of the subscriber growth Fight Pass has experienced also has been predicated on launching local versions in global markets. It launched a local channel in Russia last year and has one planned for Japan in the coming months.
I asked Sullivan why a UFC fan should shell out $100 for Fight Pass when ESPN+ already has plenty of content — both live events and shoulder programming. He said Fight Pass caters to the most avid MMA fans and is designed to exist alongside ESPN+.
“If I’m a combat sports fan, I want to dig in and have a one-stop shop for anything related to combat sports,” Sullivan said. “ESPN+ is a critical partner to UFC. But it really is just something completely different than UFC Fight Pass.”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ and read his twice-weekly newsletter.
