The heavyweight title fight between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder reportedly generated disappointing pay-per-view numbers. And there appears to be a specific reason.
The fight did between 800,000 and 850,000, well below the reported “break-even” number of 1.2 million.
That is the result, at least in part, of theft, according to a report on Yahoo! Sports.
Sources told the outlet that digital sales did well but cable and satellite did not, which took a bit out of the overall buy rate. Thieves evidently stole the signal. According to VFT Solutions, which tracks signal piracy, there were between 20 million and 30 million views on either social media platforms or video on demand. Many bars and restaurants also provided the fight illegally, according to the report.
Wayne Lonstein, a spokesperson for VFT Solutions, told Yahoo! Sports that one possible remedy is reaching out directly to those who view events illegally.
“Millions of people are self-identifying as, ‘Hey, we want to see this fight,’” he told Yahoo! Sports. “When you get into the millions, there is opportunity here [to sell them the signal legally]. The social demand and social consumption is so great that we are and have been working with a lot of content owners to actually move people. We can insert live messages into the chat stream and we get thousands of clicks to where we want to send them. It’s a nascent technology … but there is a lot of opportunity there.”
Lonstein went on: “You’ve heard people for years saying boxing is dead, but if you really look at this and do an analysis, people are hungry for the content. The product is becoming compelling and there is interest in it, no question. There is an astounding opportunity [to convert some of those signal thieves into buyers], but it’s a major issue, and it’s just getting bigger.”
The first Fury-Wilder fight, in December 2018, did roughly 300,000 buys.