Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wants to become a big player in mixed martial arts, and I'm glad that HDNet, the cable channel he owns, provided live coverage of the Dream.3 show in Japan this weekend.But Jim Murphy of The Savage Science makes some good points that reflect what I was thinking while I watched Dream.3: HDNet has some work to do on the production values of its live MMA coverage. Murphy writes:
my experience as a DREAM.3 viewer bordered on painful. Were it not my job to do a play by play narrative on the event I would have literally turned it off midway through. For the production and broadcast elements to be so qualitatively poor as to ruin an excellent night of fights is downright inexcusable. The HD Net US coverage of DREAM.3 was easily the worst overall production of a major promotion fight sport show that I've ever seen. In a lifetime of watching boxing, pro wrestling and MMA I've honestly never seen anything like it.I'm not quite prepared to go that far -- I saw some 1980s pro wrestling shows that looked like they were being broadcast by a guy standing in his basement with a camcorder -- but HDNet's work is, from a technical perspective, clearly inferior to the product UFC puts out.
Even if you forgive HDNet for cutting costs by not sending its announcers to Japan, they could have done a better job of giving home viewers the feel of being there, they could have shown the clock to let viewers know how much time was left in each round, and Bas Rutten could have seemed like he cared more about the fights. It was a disappointing effort for HDNet.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-12-2008 @ 9:48PM
Jim Murphy said...
Hey, thanks for commenting on my article. I read your stuff every day and you've always got something interesting to say so it's nice to have you linking to my stuff.
I think the big difference between some of the low rent 1980's pro wrestling promotions and HDNet's coverage is that back then the shoddy production values were almost part of the charm of pro wrestling. I remember watching South Atlantic Pro Wrestling shows where the audience members all looked like escaped convicts and the production level made it look like they decided to cut costs by eliminating lighting. A lot of these outfits were trying to produce shows with a non-existent budget and it looked like it.
The big difference here IMO is that HDNet has no excuse on any level--they've got the capital to put on a good show and have a high quality product to showcase. Based on his management of the Mavs, Cuban should *know* this stuff and hopefully is as at least as worked up as I was. In the MMA world at least, the DREAM shows are a big deal and the HDNet coverage should reflect that. Not dropping a few thousand bucks on plane tickets to have the announcing team at the venue live and the "Bas Rutten Comedy Hour" that passed for commentary did just the opposite and made the event seem as un-important as a BoDog Fight re-run.
My concern is that HDNet, et. al. are going to make the same mistakes that the "old school" wrestling promoters like Crockett, Verne Gagne, etc. did during the WWE's national expansion. They had the mistaken belief that if they just put what they perceived to be "better" wrestlers in the ring and turned on the cameras that the casual and new fans would notice the difference. That experience showed that particularly for "newcomers" the production quality and the "sales job" done by the promotion goes a long way toward shaping their impression of who's "major league" and who's not.
In HDNet's case, they're trying to establish themselves in marketplace that the UFC dominates to such an extent that the term "ultimate fighting" is frequently used as a synonym for "MMA". Making it more of a challenge is the UFC's high level of production quality. No doubt its expensive to compete with them in this area but if you're going after the 'casual' fans there's no alternative. In this particular instance, why they didn't take advantage of the DREAM pagentry and particularly Daisuke Sato's amazing video work is beyond me.
In any case, the marketing and broadcasting of fight sports is a particular interest of mine so I'll stop because I could yammer on all day about this. Thanks again for reading and posting the article...
Reply