As much as I love the UFC, the thought of buying a PPV event just to watch it by myself is not something that crosses my mind often. Usually, I prefer to see it with a gathering of other people, either at a party or at a sports pub. So it says something when a fight card is so stacked that I am willing to do exactly that. UFC 168 is one of those cards.
UFC 168 was a night with a lot of surprises. I was blown away that Josh Barnett lost. I was pleased to see Ronda Rousey give a 12 minute seminar on why we should question the notion that “wrestling beats Judo.” And of course, I joined everyone in horror as I saw what may have been the end of Anderson Silva’s career.
The thing that I wanted to talk about in today’s entry, though, was the new UFC Fight Pass that was advertised before the event. If you haven’t heard about it, I encourage you to watch this video:
I love the free fight nights. I love the collection of the television shows in a single location. I love the original content. But most of all, I love the access to the older video libraries, particularly the PrideFC library.
I recently cancelled my cable subscription (just the TV; I kept the internet) because I hate being forced to buy a package of something in order to get 5% of the package. It doesn’t matter to me if I have 200 channels if there are only 3 channels that I watch. So I like when I have the option of paying a small fee to get the specific content that I want, and not have to deal with the rest.
I know this will make me unpopular with some people, but I’m actually a big proponent of these “micro-subscriptions,” or subscriptions that get you a specific and refined piece of content but don’t ask you to pay for anything else. For example, I like the Creative Cloud model for Adobe products and the Office 365 model for MS Office. Can you imagine if you could chose 5 channels to watch at a dramatically reduced rate? Can you imagine if you could start and stop subscriptions on a monthly basis based on your needs and life events? I can, and I hope to see it more frequently.