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Extract from Bob Arum's Statement on Technology at the WBC Annual Convention
"I just want to digress, just briefly. I've been in this business since the mid-1960s and when I first started, there were no satellites. When Muhammad Ali fought a championship fight, a tape was made in a studio in New York and rushed to a plane to be shown the next day in the United Kingdom. And, God forbid, if the tape missed the plane, the rights fee was cut by fifty-percent. "And then we had satellites that proliferated all over the world so boxing matches could be shown, taking place in Las Vegas, shown in Japan and Thailand, in England, in Europe. And domestic satellites, which made it possible to have pay-per-view in the United States and other countries, so fighters, like Mr. Sulaiman has said, could make 25 or 30 million dollars in one fight. "But you know something? All that technology that has driven the sport is going to be obsolete. We are now entering a new age where communications will be over the internet, where people will be able to purchase a fight on pay-per-view on their computers, which will be their television sets, so that the audience will be hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, so that the riches that will come to this sport will be enormous." |