UFC 138 and the trouble with tape delay

In the context of prosecuting PPV pirates, UFC President Dana White has noted the hugely diminished worth of a show once a fan knows the results.

“You’ve got to understand, all this stuff is brand new, said White. “Even when the music thing happened with Napster and all that stuff, if I take your song and let people download the song, the song isn’t ruined. People still want to hear that song or the album or whatever it is. When our event gets stolen, it’s dead. It’s over. You know the results. A live event is different than anything else.”

With the UFC promoting events across vastly different time zones, the pitfalls of a tape-dealyed show are increasingly becoming apparent, as related by MMAFighting’s Ben Fowlkes.

I thought I could, through sheer force of will, make the Spike TV tape delay a non-issue.

I watched the Facebook prelims, and then I resolved to shut my laptop until the Spike broadcast started some five hours later. Thus disconnected, I thought I was home free.

Then my phone buzzed with a text message from a friend. I should have thought twice before checking it, but habit got the better of me.

Now I knew, and I could not un-know.

I still didn’t know what happened in the Brad Pickett-Renan Barao fight. I’d even maintained an impressive degree of ignorance with regards to the fate of Thiago Alves. So why couldn’t I enjoy it as if it was live?

Maybe it was just the fact that other people knew. Maybe it was that half the fun of watching fights is the idea that anything can happen, and none of us can know for sure how it will end.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to be a zombie for the rest of the day and get your results as they come in rather than be well rested and intentionally ignorant.

Why go through the sad charade of tape-delayed events? Wouldn’t it be better to broadcast live to an interested audience in the afternoon than to a ghost town in the evening?

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