ONE Championship Century Paywalled Typhoon Hagibis and a Shiny New ONE Grand Prix Belt

Asian MMA Podcast

English - October 12, 2019 16:01 - 9 minutes - 9.19 MB - ★★★★★ - 1 rating
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ONE Championship Century Paywalled Typhoon Hagibis and a Shiny New ONE Grand Prix Belt

First things first, ONE Century isn’t just a stacked card, it’s two stacked cards back to back! That is just nuts! There are so many belts on the line! If you are not planning to watch these events just punch yourself in the face! Man! This is gonna be crazy.

But from an MMA business perspective, the big news about this event is that ONE Will be moving the second card behind a paywall in the US for the first time. Of course, they have their broadcast deal with Turner so the first card will air on TNT. So if you have cable you should be able to watch that.

The more interesting part of this is that the second part of ONE Century will move behind the B/R Live paywall, which requires a $9.99 monthly subscription to view.

If you don’t have cable or want to shell out the $9.99 you might want to google what a VPN is and give that a shot.

I’m going to link to a report on The Body Lock if you guys want to take a deeper dive into this it’s a great piece of work for you to check out.

Personally, I think it’s a good time and the right market for ONE to give this a try. The US market is used to paying for premium MMA content, which this very much is. Though I think it is going to be a hard sell given the timing of the show in the states.

Despite ONEs consistently claims of billions of potential viewers for each show and the self hype of their unprecedented social media views they are still a fairly unknown commodity to all but the most hardcore of the US fans. So it will be interesting to see if they are actually able to move the needle being behind a paywall.

We can really only speculate about the motivation for the move behind the paywall, but it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that ONE is likely needing to generate some real revenue at some point. There have been more than a few sites that have jumped into the finances of the MMA promotion over the past few years showing that they are hemorrhaging cash every chance they get.

While the markets in SE Asia where ONE is the most established would not really support a PPV model, hell, even the UFC is on free TV here in Thailand, the US and Europe is another story.

If ONE Can create the expectation in those markets that consumers will have to pay for their live events then it could give them a path at least part of the way to profitability.

There live shows are on another level when compared to the UFC and I think that comes across well when watching it on TV. However, their approach to production, storytelling and to hyping up their own views on how great they are might turn off some casual western viewers.

If they do well in the market and drive subscriptions to B/R Live then we know the other big promotions like the UFC and Bellator have to keep an eye on ONE.

If they don’t, does it stall their advance to the US? Does it make their investors take a second look and question their bet on ONE?

We will have to wait and see.

Before I wrap up this episode I just want to touch on that new ONE Grand Prix belt. This belt