Dana White confirms: CBS won’t air UFC White House fights
· Yahoo Sports
Those hoping they’d be able to watch part of the upcoming UFC White House card for free on CBS better get their Paramount+ subscriptions sorted, because that’s the only place you’ll be able to watch the fights this Sunday, June 14th.
Back when the UFC White House event was announced (before it was rebranded UFC Freedom 250), there was a lot of talk about the card being on Paramount+ but with a portion simulcast on CBS, which would give the event much more reach. How much more reach? Well, Paramount+ has 80 million subscribers worldwide while CBS reaches 96% of all households in America for a potential 300 million viewers.
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So you’d think that the UFC would go with the tried and true method of airing at least a portion of the White House event on CBS before flipping the switch over to Paramount+ for the title fights or something.
You’d think wrong.
After weeks of speculation regarding a CBS simulcast, UFC CEO Dana White has confirmed that unless you’re at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the only way to watch the event will be on Paramount+.
“Yeah, no. No,” White said during a media scrum on Tuesday night (video via MMA Junkie). “We were talking — no, because there’s only X number of fights and it starts from the first one. We start at the beginning of time and like the Mexican Independence Day fight that we did, we’re going to tell the story of America from the first fight to the last. So no, they’ll all be on Paramount+.”
Trying to frame this as a decision to maintain the narrative integrity of the event’s storytelling is certainly a choice. We all know what’s really up: Paramount+ is paying the UFC over a billion dollars a year in media rights, and they need to make that money back in subscriptions.
But we don’t blame Dana White for dressing it up as a ‘history of America’ thing. They’re currently battling a lawsuit to shut the White House down that argues the UFC and Paramount are financially benefiting from the event. Admitting they put this American birthday celebration behind a paywall because Paramount wants to make money off subscriptions is not something an exec will say when a judge is set to decide on Thursday whether the show can go on.
On the plus side, Paramount+ subscriptions aren’t too expensive and $14 beats paying $80 a month like MMA fans were used to. And hey, sign up after June 12th and you could get the UFC White House card and UFC 329 with Conor McGregor all on one month’s subscription.