FOX have officially unveiled their plans for their next FOX Sports 1 channel and the UFC is set to play a big part on it.
A UFC ‘Fight Night’ event will air on August 17th, the night the channel launches, and from then on until an unspecified date in 2014 there will a total of twelve events which will air on Wednesday nights from 8-11pm ET.
The flagship ‘UFC Tonight’ show will also be moving to the channel and will air on Wednesday nights at 7.30pm.
FS1 will also be the place to tune in for the preliminary cards of all the UFC’s pay-per-view and UFC On FOX’ events in addition to hundreds of hours of other UFC related programming such as ‘UFC Unleashed’, ‘Countdown’ shows, etc.
Along with UFC coverage the channel will also play host to Nascar events, MLB games, college basketballl / football and soccer.
FOX see this new channel as a genuine challenger to ESPN and given that it’ll be available in 90 million homes in the U.S it’s a great platform for the UFC to be on.
It all sounds very exciting, but I’m curious to see how this effects the UFC’s schedule. Will the new ‘Fight Night’ events be the equivalent of the current ‘UFC On Fuel TV’ or / and ‘UFC On FX’ shows? Does this mean an end to UFC live events on FX altogether? Will Wednesday nights prove to be as popular as weekend ones?
It looks like they are going to be keeping the ‘UFC On FOX’ shows though which is a good thing, and since it wasn’t mentioned here I’d assume that ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ will also be remaining on FX.
(Article updated to reflect the fact events won’t be bi-weekly as was originally implied)
