BKFC Robbed Blind By Thieving Internet Pirates

Everybody wanted to watch BKFC 56 — but nobody wanted to pay for it.

That’s according to promotion president David Feldman, who told MMA on SiriusXM that “Perry vs. Alvarez” will likely finish with roughly 100,000 pay-per-view (PPV) buys, despite the pre-fight tracking numbers predicting somewhere in the neighborhood of 275,000 buys.

Welcome to the fight game.

“The company that worked last time and found almost 800,000 found 1.3 million unique IP addresses streamed it,” Feldman said (transcribed by MMA News). “So, it just sucks man. It’s good and it sucks, right, because I can’t keep saying, ‘Wow, 1.3 million people watched us or 2 million people watched us,’ because they’re not frickin’ paying for it.”

That’s unfortunate, because BKFC 56 was a bona fide banger.

“We probably did closer to 100,000 buys and it’s just discouraging because when you go in here and you do these projections and you’re like, ‘This is the way it’s trending,’ and this one was trending towards 275,000 buys,” Feldman continued. “That’s what it looked like in the marketing and all the media trending into it and it didn’t get there, and it’s just because people are stealing it, man, and it sucks.”

Blame the (expletive) nerds.

Internet piracy has been a hot-button issue for … well, as long as the Internet has been up and running. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a viable solution, so UFC has made it a point to single out the few people it manages to catch — then makes an example of them. As of now, piracy can be considered the cost of doing business in the digital age.

Unless this controversial bill gets approved.