The meet and greet was at UFC 306 at the Sphere in Las Vegas nearly a year ago. In the luxury box of TKO Holdings, which owns UFC and WWE, were media luminaries: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Disney’s Bob Iger and the future leader of Paramount, David Ellison, CEO of Skydance.

This deal comes one week after ESPN cut a deal with another TKO company, WWE, to air all of its premium live events on the network’s new platform.

Set to last seven years, with an average annual value of $1.1bn, the contract marks the impending end of the UFC’s partnership with ESPN, a relationship that began in 2019. More importantly, however, the deal also means the end of the UFC’s pay-per-view (PPV) model.