UFC has announced a six-year deal to bring "all UFC numbered event main cards" to Paramount+ in Canada beginning in 2027.
No more PPVs for the Canadians, who have still been charged full price since January.
Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."
Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That's the metered intelligence business model.
And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.
For about ten years, the DVD made Hollywood more money than the movie theater did. A film could flop in cinemas and still turn a tidy profit once it hit the shelf at Best Buy. In 2005, discs sold around $16 billion in the US. Theaters made about half that.
That safety net changed the kind of films that got made. Since a strong disc run could cover a box-office miss, studios were willing to bet on smaller, odder movies. A scrappy comedy like Napoleon Dynamite or The Big Lebowski could rake in as much from disc sales as it ever made selling tickets, sometimes more. And the hours of behind-the-scenes extras Jackson misses got made for the same reason: the discs sold well enough to pay for them.
Then streaming showed up, and the disc money fell off a cliff. Sales sank more than 80%. By 2018, DVDs were down to barely $2 billion. By 2023, a full half-year of disc sales added up to about $754 million, less than a tenth of the old peak. With the safety net gone, the risky bets stopped. The mid-size movie, the $20 to $60 million film that filled theaters for decades, mostly stopped getting made. Hollywood's big studios put out 204 movies in 2006. By 2010, that was down to 141.
The digital version that replaced the disc comes with fine print. When you click "buy" on a movie, you're really just renting it. What you actually get is a license, a permission slip the store can take back. In late 2023, PlayStation warned customers it was about to wipe more than 1,300 shows they had already paid for. It backed off only after signing a fresh deal, and even that one expires in a couple of years. California now has a law, on the books since 2025, that makes stores admit the "buy" button is actually a rental.
Jackson's old box sets still sit on a shelf and still play, extras and all. The digital copies most people traded them for can vanish the morning a licensing contract runs out.
I knew I was going to feel dirty watching that main event. Didn't realize how dirty. Giving Benson to Habirora, 25, after 3 years gone, at 42? Never a great idea. Went as expected sadly. Habirora is legit, just give him active guys.
Today marks my last day with Professional Fighters League.
I’m grateful for the people, experiences, & opportunity to be part of PFL.
I’ve decided it’s time for a new chapter, & I’m excited to share what’s next soon.
still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them
I've seen some bizarre takes on #RouseyCarano but this one from Variety... too many undercard fights? Never seen a UFC event? This had 11 fights total. Six on Youtube. Just five on Netflix. On the low end of fights for an MMA.
The number of undercard fights was never an issue.
So we're not alone in this. I won't say it was out biggest traffic day ever (it's up there), but like I mentioned in my last tweet, big. It drew interest without question. Whether MVP can parlay this into a regular spot on Netflix remains to be seen.
We don't normally go into our usage numbers, but for whatever it's worth, in terms of the discussion of whether anyone was tuning in to watch MMA yesterday, it was by far the biggest traffic day in our history. Not even close. One of those new records where you don't expect to top it again for a good long while. Except there's some unusual stuff coming soon with Freedom Fights and Conor McGregor's return, so who knows.
So much debate, a lot of it heavily biased, over MVP's #RouseyCarano card on Netflix. While the main event was an (expected) dud, there were bright spots and based on our numbers, interest was SKY high. That's just one MMA site, but traffic was way higher than avg. UFC PPVs.