Bellator 64 TV Ratings Match Season High, but Future on Spike Holds the Key

The TV ratings for Bellator 64 on Friday night tied the Season 6 high for the promotion, drawing 175,000 viewers on MTV2.

The season low to this point is 108,000 for Bellator 61, with the five weeks thus far averaging 153,400 viewers per episode.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the oft maligned TUF: Live TV ratings that just dipped below one million viewers for the first time in Ultimate Fighter history, but the comparison is a difficult one to make.

Just like UFC programming on Fuel TV doesn’t do as well as programming on FX, Bellator’s programming on MTV2 suffers from the lower availability of the network and MTV2 not being known for sports programming.

Bellator’s season average of viewers per episode has steadily declined over the past three seasons.

Bellator, and its new owner Viacom, hopes to rectify that situation when sister station Spike TV’s rights to UFC programming runs out at the end of 2012. Spike intends to replace its UFC programming with Bellator in 2013, becoming the home for Bellator events and other programming, such as a Bellator reality show that is currently in the works.

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