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Cable World Staff
For the first half of 1999 the pay-per-view event industry set new records, racking up an eye-popping $267 million in revenues and easily surpassing revenues the segment earned during all of 1998.
And with the possibility of Mike Tyson returning to the boxing ring this fall, the year only promises to get better, said Mark Greenberg, Showtime Event Television's EVP/GM. SET, the PPV production and distribution arm of Viacom Inc., released the PPV summary last week.
"The enormous interest in boxing and wrestling continues to drive the category and we expect the upcoming Mike Tyson bout later this year to give another boost to our results," Greenberg said. "We feel that this success suggests that there is an opportunity to achieve greater results through the development of a wider array of special event programming."
It isn't too surprising that 1999 revenues are improved over the previous year, when a flurry of cancellations or postponements of key heavyweight boxing matches pushed the PPV event category into a decline. Revenues dropped from $400 million in 1998 to $241 million in 1997, according to Paul Kagan Associates.
While a bigger and more steady stream of events in 1999 has boosted the event category, industry watchers note that it is impossible to predict how the next six months will play out. Tyson, scheduled to fight this fall, is notoriously unpredictable and unreliable. And all boxing events are tempered by the vagaries of fighter health and temperament.
Still, the event category appears to be enjoying a renaissance, led by the ever-popular boxing and wrestling categories, which dominated the category with earnings of $120 million and $140 million respectively. Those two ring sports generated about 98% of the PPV event revenue in the first half of 1999.
And, despite a proliferation of wrestling events on cable and broadcast TV, wrestling appears to have lost little of its luster among PPV buyers. The category surpassed all non-boxing events, generating $140 million over the course of 16 events in the first half. It marks a significant improvement over the first half of 1998, which generated $95 million
A total of 19 boxing events were distributed in the first half of 1999, generating a 715% increase in revenue over the same period last year, which earned only $15 million in revenues.
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