News has come out today that Jeff Horn’s WBO title defense against pound for pound elite Terence Crawford in his welterweight debut will come with a price tag. Yet, unlike what was rumored when Manny Pacquiao was targeted to join the show, it also won’t be a PPV. It is time to learn about ESPN+.
Earlier this year ESPN announced that it will be launching their own streaming service this sometime this spring. It will be titled ESPN+ and will be an entirely separate “channel” than the traditional ESPN cable channels. Specific content will not overlap. Evidently, this service will launch before the rescheduled date of Jeff Horn’s welterweight title defense against Terence Crawford as it has been announced that that fight will air on it.
Pricing for the service will be $4.99 per month initially, meaning you can fork out five dollars for the card and then cancel the service if you’d like. As a boxing fan, however, you might just want to hold onto it. Top Rank has expanded their deal with the sports giant to hold twelve cards a year on ESPN+. New ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro is going as far as to say these will be “very, very high quality” cards as well. I don’t think that can be true though. Top Rank is seemingly thriving right now, but not even they have enough star power to put twelve major cards onto ESPN’s direct to consumer streaming service while continuing what they do on the main network now.
Terence Crawford versus Jeff Horn is definitely a high quality main event at the very least to kick off the series, even if the rest of the shows end up showcasing earlier stage prospects and more middling elements of their stable. If you remember, the initial rumors surrounding the Top Rank to ESPN deal didn’t just speak of the move to the network, but also of a streaming service to broadcast their smaller cards. Obviously I cannot know, but I suspect that is what we will see after they use a huge fight to launch initially.
The earliest potential rescheduled date for the fight (and presumably the launch of the OTT service) I’ve seen floating around so far is May 19th with mid-June being the latest.
