As of yesterday the deal was made official. The UFC has signed an exclusive North American broadcasting deal with Paramount for the next 7 years.
This means some really good things for UFC fans and honestly, it could end up improving the UFC in a general sense, for the reasons that I will detail now.
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When I think of Paramount I think of a logo that pops up before a movie every now and then, the TV show Yellowstone and well, that's about it. I certainly don't associate them with sports but the world is about to, that much is for certain.
The deal cost over $7 billion to close and now anyone who has a Paramount+ account will have free access to all of the major UFC events that take place during a calendar year - which is 13 of them. With this deal Paramount will also have exclusive broadcast rights for 30 of the Fight Night events, which isn't actually that big of a deal because most people just skip those or just look at the headlines the next day.
I, for one, am very happy that this is happening although there are going to be some caveats. The advertising that was taking place during UFC events was already getting out of control to the point where the events would take entirely too long so that the paid advertisers could be the real start of the show, not so much the fights. With there no longer being a cost or "pay per view" associated with even being able to legally watch the matches, I can only imagine that this level of advertising is going to increase.
I've said it many times before: Almost all professional sports don't have anything to do with the sport itself, it has everything to do with making money. Now that the normally $60 buy in to watch the event is gone, they are going to make it up elsewhere and this is likely to be in the form of more commercials.
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Something else that could end up being a bad thing is that the fight purses in the past were often attached to the amount of PPV buys that happened and would be shared with the headlining fighters. With no PPV income to speak of, how is this going to be handled? Dana White has been very dismissive of accusation of paying too little to the fighters, but if this amount goes DOWN, we could see some trouble on the horizon.
Sean Strickland, whose words can normally be ignored because he is a hot-head idiot, once advised all fighters to do literally anything other than be a fighter because everyone other than the top guys is barely scraping together a living. If we start seeing the fight purse minimums being the only choice for the fighters, how long are they going to stick around?
Well i've mentioned the bad now lets talk about the good that will come from this. Provided they don't change the price of a Paramount+ subscription because of this (I wouldn't bet on that) the cost of being a UFC fan just went DOWN dramatically. With an average price of less than $13 a month for Paramount+ this just made watching UFC extremely affordable.
There are lower-cost tiers for Paramount's services, but since UFC broadcasting is likely to be absorbed by the CBS wing of the company - which is only viewable with the top-tier membership - this is quite likely the only place that we will be able to watch UFC events unless CBS decides, for some reason, to broadcast it on "regular CBS" as well.
The bottom line is that Pay-Per-View as a model with MMA fights is likely dead as of the end of 2025 - and I think this is a good thing. I for one was never paying for them and went through those dodgy sites that have the broadcast if you are willing to minimize the dozens of pop up ads that would regularly occur along with the ads the event itself was showing.
As of right now, Paramount has announced they have NO PLANS to increase the subscription fee that will include UFC. If they can stick with this, I will be very proud of them... BUT at the end of the day I don't think Paramount cares about sports, movies, or tv-series and is only interested in money and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they hold out until early 2026 before the first UFC broadcast on their network, to announce a new "UFC PASS" or something like that. No matter what they decide to do though, it will be a significant savings to UFC fans who were paying for each numbered event individually.
It is my understanding that most of the rest of the world is able to, and has always been able to access these events for free, and it will be interesting to see how Paramount handles that.