Dan Hardy’s career-threatening UFC fight with American Chris Lytle will be aired on UFC.TV live from 2am online in the early hours of Sunday morning in the UK. At present, ESPN has no tv rights to air Versus events or UFC prelims, because they did not exist two years ago when the deal between UFC and ESPN was signed. The two parties were unable to come to terms on the event this week.
ESPN has a broadcast deal with the UFC until August 2012, and will continue to air UFC main events.
How to watch free:
UFC Live: Dan Hardy v Chris Lytle
The preliminary events are ufc facebook page. just ‘like’ the page and watch prelims from 10.45pm
After that it goes to 2am main card – watch free on UFC.TV. Registration takes 2 minutes and incurs no cost.
The event is on replay at ufc.tv for the next week, so if you miss it, you can just go on and watch it again.
UFC UK President Marshall Zelaznik said: “Versus programming falls outside of our current deal with ESPN. While efforts were made to get ESPN the carry the Hardy fight, we could not come to terms. We understand UFC fans and ESPN customers will be disappointed, so the UFC has made the entire main card available – for free – live and on-demand all next week to ensure everyone can see this fights.”
“The Versus shows only came into being in early 2010, after our agreement with ESPN had already been signed. Nevertheless we have worked with ESPN to bring these cards to ESPN subscribers; but on this occasion with Sunday’s fight ESPN decided not to license the event.
“Ultimately, we did all we could to try and get this programming out. There’s a some of talk online that this is a step towards all UFC events going on Pay-Per-View in the UK – truth is this has not been a factor in this situation. ESPN continues to show the vast majority of major UFC action and with our relationship with Five there is plenty of content available to our fans. We feel confident that our hard core fan base will understand and find a way to see the fights through UFC.tv.”
THIS WEEK’S ESPN UFC PODCAST – Chris Lytle breaks down his fight with Dan Hardy
No comments:
Post a Comment