When #2 Beats#1 in Sports: Key Insights from Professional Fighters League, Swerve Sports, Roku, and Major League Table Tennis
There are hundreds of distinct sports that have been televised somewhere globally. What makes one sport work so well on TV, and not another? That’s just one fascinating topic I discussed with four panelists at Streaming Media 2025 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica.
Two of those panelists were involved with combat sports, which has proven to be a hot format in linear and live channel environments, including FAST.
So hot, in fact, that combat also happens to be at the center of a watershed licensing agreement recently signed between the newly formed Paramount+/Skydance and UFC, the #1 combat sports brand in the world.
Combat sports rides the wave
That deal is ground-shaking for combat sports, which has built a profitable Pay-Per-View business over decades. At $7.2B over seven years, it was too much money for UFC to refuse. The massive global success of the 2024 Netflix Tyson vs. Paul fight, which was included with a Netflix subscription, shows how much combat fandom can be unlocked among a wider audience.
Since the UFC deal is done, and at such a high price, the opportunity to have SVP Mike Chioditti of Professional Fighters League on our panel was priceless. Following its Bellator acquisition, PFL – one of the pioneer brands of the FAST universe – sits awfully pretty as a number two combat brand riding a streaming TV tsunami.
“We're in our final year with ESPN," Chioditti said. "So we're having discussions with all the various tech media and FAST platforms. We have the young male hard-to-reach demo. MMA has been the growth sport of the last decade. Really, women’s sports, and MMA, have been kind of the two sports that continue to see exponential growth."
David Guinan, GM, Major League Table Tennis (left), Mike Chioditti, SVP, Professional Fighters League (right)
That means they’re riding a huge organic viewing wave and using that energy to grow their brand and capitalize on the moment. When you’re number two in the hottest growth sport and the number one has just tied the knot with a gargantuan engagement ring, that’s when it’s good to be number two, Chioditti said.
“We are activating our fans across all the various distribution points to make sure we're maximizing value and have optionality. We relaunched our app last year, we doubled down on our FAST strategy, and we'll be in the market talking to all the various distributors and tech partners."
When asked whether such an exceptionally large deal made financial sense, Chioditti addressed it directly:
"It's a great deal for the fans, right? Now there's one home for UFC, it doesn't require the friction of a pay per view model. It's probably a bigger risk for Paramount, because that pay-per-view model was wildly profitable for ESPN. But, it's great for the fan, it's great for UFC. And it's a big swing for Paramount. It's an exciting time in the industry -- a real moment to bring MMA into the mainstream. It's going to be a great case study for the sports ecosystem."
Setting the table for FAST success
This success of combat sports is no accident.
Of the hundreds of sports mentioned above, boxing and MMA are inherently suited for a wide range of digital video environments, including FAST. Why? That was a central question I asked my panel to help me break down.
The rules, or, the ability to understand or learn them, is essential.
David Guinan, formerly of the Cowboy Channel and now GM of Major League Table Tennis: "The reality of most of those traditional ball sports is that you have to know the rules to watch the content. You can’t just turn on a football game. If you don’t know what a holding penalty is, you’re lost. Rules are pretty easy with combat.”
Then there’s a biological feature to watchability. Speaking from experience: fights are impossible to channel-surf past. There’s a pull, a surge of adrenaline that comes with seeing two guys, or gals, duke it out. Guinian quantified it for us. “It needs to involve peril. Extreme sports are good at that.” He went on. “It needs to be good live as an actual live event. It needs to be good on a couch. And it also needs to be good on your phone. All tier one sports do this very, very effectively.”
Fighting is an irresistible, high-stakes viewing experience. It’s quick. It’s easy to understand. It’s great for sports betting. And one more thing, which came up during my prep chat with PFL’s Chioditti: the power of demographics.
“The truth is that our content works really well on FAST, in part because of what you’re talking about there, but also due to our core audience age," Chioditti said. "We today have so much great content airing on our FAST channel, it’s not live, but to our audience, in that moment, it’s still totally unpredictable.”
Christy Tanner, Chair of Swerve TV, also knows combat sports. Swerve Combat is one of the most successful independent FAST Channels. Tanner is chairing Swerve’s new second channel, Swerve Sports, focused on women’s sports.
“Swerve TV is about four years old," she said. "We initially started as a sports documentary channel, Swerve TV. And it was doing okay. But we found that every documentary that we showed in the combat space outperformed everything else. So we pivoted to Swerve Combat about three years ago.” She continued, “And once we pivoted to MMA and boxing, we also started doing live events. We've done more than 300 live events in the past year. And that also led to another step change in the growth of the channel.”
Joe Franzetta, Head of Live Sports, Roku (left), Christy Tanner, Chair, Swerve Sports (right)
Live in Roku City
There is no other device company in the US that is as responsible for streaming TV’s successful growth over the past decade than Roku.
My research (free at #FutureOfTV.Live) has always shown them to be the leading device. They have a great remote, a popular purple screensaver known as Roku City, and a growing roster of marquee Live Sports brands that are knocking at Joe Franzetta’s office door on the daily to compete for a spot on the deck.
For Franzetta, the purple glow of Roku screensavers visible in window after window as he walks his neighborhood serves as a nightly reminder of his mission as Head of Sports at Roku.
"The big challenge in streaming, you hear this from everyone in the industry, from fans, from viewers, is: where can I find the content I want to watch? If I'm a Yankees fan, which I’m not, but it's on like five different services in one week.” Roku Sports, he said, is about removing that friction with an aggregated sports destination.
“You turn on your Roku. Or first, you see Roku City sliding by. And right from there, you're able to navigate directly into a sports destination. We call it the Sports Zone. We have an MLB zone, an NBA zone, we have thirteen zones now. Live content. Clips and highlights."
This aggregation strategy also extends to FAST. "We also have The Roku Channel, which is our free ad-supported service on the platform. It's the number two app on our entire platform. So it's very strong. Lots of daily, weekly, monthly viewers. With the growth of channels on the Live TV guide, we decided let's aggregate the content that we have rights to as a first-party into a dedicated channel to take advantage of all of that. So we launched the Roku Sports Channel. The idea of building a linear 24/7 sports channel that we then integrate into the larger sports experience is unique."
A great panel, filled with insights. For more reading on Roku City, check out a previous article published, Will Sticky Screensavers Save Streaming?
Brian Ring leads Ring Digital llc which publishes a free quarterly TV survey at #FutureOfTV.Live. His next zoomcast is October 31st at 9am PT. Register here, free.
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