What's at stake in the UFC's next media rights deal?

Where will we watch the fights and what's it likely to cost us?

How TKO obtains a new media rights deal for UFC will expose the strength — or weakness — of the UFC’s brand of fight content. It will also determine the future parameters for new investment for those trying to compete with UFC in the fight business.

Every fight fan should be paying attention to TKO’s UFC media rights negotiations because the deals and decisions made in the next few weeks will determine how we’ll watch the fights and how much they’ll cost, likely for the rest of the decade, maybe longer.

Sports leagues like the NFL and NBA have taken themselves off the market with decade-long deals. Is there a media company that would make that kind of long-term commitment to the UFC?

Despite TKO’s endless proclamations that the UFC is a red-hot property, almost guaranteed to double its asking price, there’s really no way to know what it’s worth on the open market until the offers start coming in.

The reality is that the streaming wars are over. In the early 2020’s there was a lot of investor money pouring into media companies who had vowed to drive Netflix out of the streaming business.

In 2022, Netflix started losing subscribers, and its stock price plummeted.

Disney, NBCUniversal, and Paramount together stacked up more than $8.3 billion in streaming losses and their stock prices plummeted.

The streaming bubble popped.

And when the dust settled, it was Netflix, whose stock led the decline, and Netflix alone that bounced back, leaving the incumbent media companies to eat its dust.

For a long time, it was assumed that tech companies like Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet (owner of YouTube) would step into the breach with their seemingly infinite stacks of cash.

But now we’re in what may be a new bear market, and it seems to be Big Tech’s turn to lose in the stock market.

Over the past six months, Amazon and Alphabet have lost almost 10% of their market caps, and Apple is down almost 16%.

Meanwhile, Netflix is up an incredible 39% over the same period.

It’s becoming ever clearer why the savvy players at TKO have been courting Netflix so assiduously for the past two years, cutting a deal to stream WWE’s Monday Night Raw on Netflix and bragging every time a Netflix exec attends a UFC.

Netflix is in the driver’s seat to determine how big of a winner—or potentially a loser—TKO is for the long haul. At least until Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro flip it to another buyer.

“Sports needs Netflix exponentially more than Netflix needs sports.”

TKO brass took their UFC media rights wares to market this week as Disney/ESPN’s exclusive negotiations window closed at midnight P.T. on Tuesday, April 15.

There’s a near-consensus among pundits in MMA media, general sports media, and entertainment business analysts that Netflix and ESPN are the most likely destinations for the UFC in 2026 and beyond.

But, pundits can be wrong and often are.

Mainstream sports and entertainment writers tend not to know basic facts about the UFC, and MMA writers tend to have little to no insight into the media power dynamics at play. The loudest media voices in sports are the most ignorant, and that’s the way WME Group likes it. The fake fog-of-war gives them a chaotic cover, providing a smoke-and-mirrors game for leverage in negotiations.

To wit: John Ourand of Puck has no idea how much a UFC PPV costs, as he admitted on The Powers That Be podcast.

Jesse on Fire doesn’t seem to realize that ESPN has been paying TKO a flat fee for UFC PPVs since 2019 and spends a fair bit of time worrying that UFC quality will decline without the incentive to sell more PPVs.

This kind of controlled media opposition is perfect for WME Group. The dumber their media mouthpieces are, the easier it is to work outsiders over who have cash. Everything is kayfabe. What it means for fans is an entirely different story, especially since fight fans always eventually sniff out the phony and fake.

We know one thing: TKO believes there’s a market

But John Ourand does know how big-time media rights deals get cut:

“It’s too early to gauge how much interest is out there, but UFC would never let ESPN’s exclusive window expire if its executives weren’t confident there would be multiple other suitors. Amazon and Netflix, for two, are expected to take meetings almost right away.”

Negotiations are complicated, and the UFC is in the odd position of being owned by the agents negotiating on its behalf.

TKO CEO Ari Emanuel and COO Mark Shapiro are two of the sharpest wheeler-dealers in Hollywood history, and they’re working angles we poor pundits haven’t even conceived of.

Unfortunately for TKO, investors are expecting the UFC to get $1 billion/year for the rights. Mark Shapiro has been trying to tamp down expectations, but it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

If Netflix doesn’t bite on the UFC, or only buys a half-dozen mega-cards a year, TKO will be forced to scramble to meet investor expectations.

And since WME Group has taken out a $2.25 billion margin loan against some of their stake in TKO, what investors think really, really matters to Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, and their financial backers.

Not to mention, these negotiations are taking place at a time of great economic uncertainty, both at the macro-level and for the media industry. The streaming wars may not be over, but we pretty much know that the tech companies won and old Hollywood lost.

Shoots in Los Angeles are down 22% year-over-year, and Hollywood is looking to California Governor Gavin Newsom for a bailout before he leaves office in 2026:

And, as we saw at UFC 314 when Skydance CEO David Ellison appeared cage side, Ari Emanuel knows every executive at all the top media companies and is working many angles.

Ellison, the nepo-baby son of billionaire Oracle boss Larry Ellison, was likely there to curry favor with President Trump for a potential acquisition of Paramount.

And since he was cage side anyway, sandwiched between Ari’s wife and UFC CBO Hunter Campbell, I’m sure he got an in-depth look at the product.

With that in mind, I’m taking a deep dive into the streaming space, analyzing all the major players and their interests, and detailing several likely and unlikely scenarios for the UFC’s new media rights package.

I’m grading them all with an eye to what’s likely best for the fans, what’s in the interest of the UFC and its owners, and what are the agendas of the various media companies bidding on the rights.

Thanks to the support of our paying subscribers, The MMA Draw can bring our decades of experience covering The UFC and working inside big media to bear on this story with no hidden conflicts of interest holding us back.

Let’s go.