The allure of live sporting events is strong. It’s powerful enough to draw you in every time that a marquee event occurs. Imagine this scenario: It’s a Thursday or Friday in the middle of March. That time of year, most avid sports fans request time off from work in those two days for one simple reason:
March Madness. You can either slave away from your cubicle’s computer as you dutifully work (or pretend to work as you sneak a few peeks at your bracket from another tab on your monitor) or just take those couple of days off and come back the following Monday.
Live sports is powerful like that. Most times, there are games, matches or events that you simply have to watch live, whether you have a rooting interest in the teams or athletes participating in the competition or not. That’s why the Super Bowl is one of the highest-rated events on television annually.
No Full-Length Bellator Replays on MAX
If, for some reason, you can’t get to a television, app, or computer to watch or stream the event as it happens, depending upon the streaming service that holds the rights to the competition in your region of the world, you can stream it on a replay as early as the following day, or sometimes sooner than that.
Subscribers to Amazon Prime Video inside the United States and Canada are able to catch a replay of last Friday night’s ONE Championship event, ONE 168, at this very moment, as well as a rebroadcast of Thursday’s NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins from Hard Rock Stadium. It’s a common practice for most streamers.
ESPN, for example, will have replays of events/ programming accessible in its “Replays” tab no later than 2:30 am ET the following morning. MAX, the rightsholder of the Bellator Champions Series inside the United States, however, doesn’t afford its subscribers the chance to watch a replay. If you miss Bellator Champions Series 5 as it happens on Saturday afternoon for whatever reason, you won’t be able to watch a full-length replay after the fact.
𝙈𝘼𝙄𝙉 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙉𝙏 𝙁𝙄𝙉𝘼𝙇 𝙁𝘼𝘾𝙀 𝙊𝙁𝙁! 👀
Leah McCourt 🆚 Sara Collins
Presented by @drinkLMNT 🤝#BellatorLondon | TOMORROW
Live on DAZN & MAX | 6PM BST pic.twitter.com/8sNBmaLsdJ— Bellator MMA (@BellatorMMA) September 13, 2024
Why Is This Happening?
It’s late 2024. The ability to watch a complete replay of a sporting event after the show ends should be automatic in this day and age. MAX only gives its subscribers the opportunity to stream its coverage of MotoGP events in full after the fact.
If you miss the Leah McCourt vs. Sara Collins main event and want to watch a replay of the full show later on Saturday, you’ll be out of luck and will have to wait for the one-hour edit of the card to be released at a future date. While the one-hour edits of past Bellator shows are a small consolation, some subscribers would want to have full telecasts accessible so that they could have the experience of watching the shows gavel-to-gavel.
This is what makes UFC Fight Pass so great. You can go to Fight Pass right now (well, you should at least wait until after you finish reading this article) and type a previous UFC event, such as 1993’s UFC 1, into the search bar.
It’ll come right up and you can start watching immediately. With Bellator on MAX, you can’t watch an archived event in full. You can’t even so much as watch a one-hour rerun of last week’s show from San Diego as of this writing, with the Dublin event from June 22 being the newest option available.
It’s Like This in Other Sports on Max
If, say, you wanted to watch a replay of an entire NBA on TNT game from last season on MAX, you couldn’t do that, either, nor can you take a look at a full match replay of either game involving the United States Men’s National Team from the just-completed FIFA international window.
The best you can do is a highlight package. Why is it that MAX can have all 215 episodes of Family Matters and all 101 episodes of Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper accessible for viewing at any moment, but you have to settle for edited versions of Bellator cards, including those predating the deal with the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streaming platform?
To that extent, why aren’t the one-hour versions of past Bellator cards accessible on the outlet sooner? Think about it: It’s been six days since Bellator’s card in San Diego and MAX subscribers have no way to watch the footage from the show as of yet.
Final Thoughts
While MAX has added MMA to its sports portfolio with the Bellator Champions Series and is offering edited repeats of shows, the full-length versions of cards should be accessible on playback and they should be available soon after they happen. Fans of the promotion shouldn’t have to wait around for several weeks after the fact to see the fights they missed live.
