HBO World Championship Boxing (1973)

Country

United States

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This series aired live professional boxing matches featuring top heavyweight and other division fighters. It presented championship bouts from the 1970s onward on premium cable.

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What happens

HBO World Championship Boxing (in later years stylized in its title card as HBO Boxing – World Championship) is an American sports television series on premium television network HBO. It premiered on January 22, 1973, with a fight that saw George Foreman defeat Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica. HBO's pay-per-view distribution arm, TVKO was founded in December 1990, and then launched in April 1991 with Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman, becoming HBO PPV in 2001. On February 3, 1996, HBO debuted a spin-off program, Boxing After Dark, with the fight between Marco Antonio Barrera and Kennedy McKinney as its inaugural telecast. On September 27, 2018, HBO announced they would be dropping boxing from the network following its last televised match on October 27, though two airings on November 24 and December 8 were its last editions. Various issues in the boxing business, including the influx of streaming options (such as DAZN and ESPN+) and issues with promoters and competing entities such as Premier Boxing Champions, along with declining ratings and loss of interest in the sport among HBO's subscribers for other ring sports such as mixed martial arts and professional wrestling, made the continued carriage of the sport untenable. HBO's long-term move to upscale dramatic programming, an ownership transfer of parent WarnerMedia to AT&T, then Warner Bros. Discovery, where the company's sport division became focused on TNT as TNT Sports, and re-focus around the upcoming streaming service HBO Max also played a role in the decision, with an HBO executive commenting that "HBO is not a sports network". The network cancelled its last sports-related program, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, at the end of 2023. In March 2024, Warner Bros. Discovery revived the HBO Boxing brand as a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel that are available on Tubi and Amazon Freevee, that showcases some boxing bouts that aired on World Championship Boxing and Boxing After Dark, as well as some boxing-related episodes of 24/7. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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