Filed under: FanHouse Exclusive, News, interview, Japan
When I was a young MMA fan in the early 2000s, the only way for me to watch Japanese MMA was to trade tapes or wait sometimes years for official tapes or DVDs to be released. Later with the advent of streaming video, I was able to finally catch my MMA live via temperamental, pirated Korean streams. I was greedy though and even with my treasured Korean video, I wanted more and so I moved to Japan. These days, thanks largely to HDNet Fights CEO Andrew Simon, MMA fans need not take such desperate measures to get their JMMA fix.
After being given a clean slate by HDNet owner Mark Cuban in 2007, Simon and the team at HDNet Fights initially attempted to create a new promotion but after two events, they instead focused solely on broadcasting.
“We experimented with our own events in Dallas, but our strength is to be the leading TV network in the field of Mixed Martial Arts. We made it a goal to have more live MMA than any network in the world,” Simon explains.