Top Rank Boxing follows UFC's new-media lead, exec sees growth for both sports by John Morgan on May 05, 2011 at 10:30 am ET On the heels of the most financially lucrative MMA event in North American history, it's now time for boxing to take center stage in the combat-sports realm. This Saturday, pound-for-pound great Manny Pacquaio (52-3-2) puts his WBO welterweight title on the line against 18-year veteran "Sugar" Shane Mosley (46-6-1) at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and for the first time ever, Top Rank Boxing is partnering with NeuLion, Inc., to offer an enhanced online pay-per-view stream. NeuLion, of course, began airing the UFC's pay-per-view streams earlier this year. Top Rank president Todd duBoef said boxing is adapting to the new-media approach pioneered by MMA, and he believes both sports have room to grow and successfully coexist in the entertainment market. "I think MMA's new-media perspective has done a lot of good for the traditionalists that exist in tier-one sports," duBoef told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "Tier-one sports, if it's football, baseball, basketball, hockey and boxing – or whatever you believe they are – we are so spoiled from the years, and for boxing 100 years, of primary position in the traditional media such as newspapers, sports columns and things like that. MMA never had that luxury. Their fanbase was built through the digital platforms. People shared content there. They shared videos. They chatted. They shared everything. That is where the product was really formed, generated and chatted about, and people got news from there. "As a result of that, us traditionalists didn't give the digital platforms that much attention as newsworthy. We were spoiled into thinking we needed to get into 'USA Today' or 'The New York Times' and see how many inches the column was. As we're seeing, traditional media's delivery of content is becoming more irrelevant than digital media. "Because they weren't getting traditional media coverage early on, I think MMA was at the forefront for their sport at understanding the new-media perspective of where the fans are, who's engaged there, who's dialed in there, who's interacting there. I think we've all learned a lot from seeing how that fanbase works." MMA long has been recognized as a sort of new-media phenomenon, with the sport surviving almost solely on the Internet when it was briefly banned from television in the 1990s. More recently, the UFC has utilized social-media platforms such as Twitter to keep fans connected to the organization. Additionally, the UFC traditionally streams event interviews and ... http://mmajunkie.com/news/23490/top...dia-lead-exec-sees-growth-for-both-sports.mma
