Television
In 2007, the IFL made a television deal with Fox Sports Net and MyNetworkTV. This made it the first MMA promotion to appear regularly on broadcast TV in the United States.
The premiere of IFL Battleground on March 12, 2007 on MyNetworkTV scored a 0.8 household rating (1.12 million viewers), and gained 250% in all key male demographics (0.7 vs. 0.2) over February. This represented a new MyNetworkTV high for male 18-34, a 17% rise over the previous record of 0.6. However this episode was criticized by MMA journalists and fans, saying it glorified violence and brutality. Kurt Otto apologized to fans, their fighters and coaches, and critics for the content of that show, and that "we made a mistake with some parts of the show, but we will learn from this and grow."
On February 5, 2008 the IFL announced a partnership with the HDNet to air the first three events of their 2008 season live.
On February 15, 2008 MyNetworkTV cancelled IFL Battleground.
Read more about this topic: International Fight League
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“They [parents] can help the children work out schedules for homework, play, and television that minimize the conflicts involved in what to do first. They can offer moral support and encouragement to persist, to try again, to struggle for understanding and mastery. And they can share a child’s pleasure in mastery and accomplishment. But they must not do the job for the children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)