It has been speculated for months that Bellator Fighting Championships would air on Spike TV, now that speculation has become a reality.
The below content is thanks to usatoday.com
Media conglomerate Viacom bought a majority stake in Bellator Fighting Championships, and will start airing the promotion’s bouts on Spike in 2013. They’ve had ongoing talks for about a year, and over the past month finally reached the point where they could announce the news.
Bellator is now clearly the No. 2 promotion in mixed martial arts behind market leader Zuffa, owner of UFC and Strikeforce.
Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney
“It’s a very, very good day for mixed martial arts.”“It puts all of those cornerstones of ownership in place for us,” Rebney said. “Which is something that’s been so seriously lacking in the MMA space with so many different companies, including Strikeforce and the IFL and Affliction and all the different failures that have occurred. … It alleviates those issues.”
Kevin Kay, Spike TV president
“Who’s more competitive than Dana White? I am, but that’s not a horse race we really want to run…”“As we realized that our relationship with UFC was likely to come to an end, our Viacom mergers and acquisitions folks, and us, started to have conversations with MTV2 about getting invested in a mixed martial arts promotion and become owners as opposed to renters,” Kay said. “You’re building value in something that you own, and you own it for the long term. You’re not in a constant state of negotiation.”
“The tournament format (is), we think, a great way to get the audience invested in the fighters as personalities, as characters. I think we can help, with the expertise we have in building fighters as fighters that people want to see and come back week to week.”
“The goal is HD all the time and once we get to Spike, it’ll be that way. When you’re looking at an organization like Bellator, what you see is the opportunity for growth and to grow ratings. We have big expectations.”
“There’s a lot of factors we’re going to analyze and figure out (what night works best). Also, where’s our audience used to watching it? … I don’t know that you want to program football against football or baseball against baseball.”
“I had the same fear (several years ago, about swiching promotions): ‘Are people going to watch another wrestling organization on Spike?’ That first year or so, we had probably (an average of) 600,000 viewers. Last week we had 2 million; it’s the highest-rated TNA in the history of Spike.”
“The timing remains to be seen in terms of when exactly (international expansion) occurs, but that will occur. International expansion of live Bellator events will absolutely occur.”
It was stated in the piece that Bellator and UFC may go after the same talent, which is obvious, however do you see Bellator ever gaining any ground on the head honcho? Does this deal with Spike TV mean much? Will the UFC try to buy out Bellator now?
