TUF 12

TUF 12 Moving to Sky Sports

Next week sees the start of season 12 of The Ultimate Fighter. By now most fans will have heard the news that TUF 12 is being shown on sky sports instead of freeview (five usa). This has come as a shock to quite a few including myself as I thought the TUF series’ would have been more available on freeview than sky.
But if you look at it from the ufc’s point of view, the viewing numbers from the broadcasts on freeview have been poor. Sky sports is the flagship sports broadcaster in the uk and will normally have good viewing figures even for minority sports. Also the common male subscriber of sky sports falls into the 18-35 age category which also happens to be the ufc’s target audience.
So with this move of TUF 12 to sky sports I can see the ufc may have a plan to move all ufc events in the uk to Pay Per View. Dana White has admitted regularly that he wants the uk market to be pay per view. Currently the ufc has 2 years left on a deal with espn uk to broadcast all ufc events and other programmes. So I assume that when this deal is over that we may end up being in a pay per view market.
Anyway back to the subject. In my opinion having tuf on freeview was an experiment to draw in new fans to the sport. I do believe this has worked as once again the latest ufc card has all but sold out even though its lacking the big names.
So when will we see if tuf 12 is a success on sky sports? I believe we wont until the deal with espn uk is close to the end and are listening to offers from other broadcasters. I do hope we don’t move into the pay per view market as i think it will hit the uk market hard. Who would be willing to pay £15 for every event?
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