iVisit Boxing chief on its grand aims to change the sport

iVisit Boxing certainly caught the eye with the announcement it made earlier this month, revealing its aim to break the world record for the highest attended boxing bout, in San Francisco this summer, 11 July.

This builds on the event iVisit organised in Times Square last year, which saw a shock defeat for Ryan Garcia.

The company is also innovating when it comes to its distribution, deciding to show the card on YouTube, with parts free to watch and others pay-per-view.

Broadcast Sport sat down with CEO Ed Pereira shortly after the news broke, and he said that iVisit aims to, “bring a fan first mentality to boxing,” which extends to its strategy with YouTube.

Pereira revealed that both linear broadcasters and streaming platforms had also been interested in acquiring the rights for this follow up event, which has been in planning since March 2025. He explained, “Sometimes it’s easy to make the decision because somebody’s paying more money than someone else. In this instance, it was a little bit more than that.

“This line that we use, ‘bringing boxing back to the people,’ sounds like a tagline, but it’s actually more than that for us. It’s our guiding star, our principle. When looking at our broadcast options, the one that stood out by a long way was YouTube, because it answers that.”

Pereira pointed to the video platform’s 2.7 billion active users and how, “It’s baked into every single piece of tech that goes out now in a way that others are not,” as evidence of its accessibility. As for how the fight night will be broadcast, YouTube’s NFL broadcasts for how he hopes iVisit’s boxing will be broadcast – which include split screen watchalongs, camera angle selection and more. He said, “Things like that have been available before to certain degree, but not in such an integrated way.”

However, while Pereira is keen for the greatest reach possible, he is also aware of the need to financially support the iVisit’s events. This means that some bouts will be pay-per-view, although, “The scale and reach of YouTube makes it so we can lower the cost.”

He backed pay-per-view for the foreseeable future, despite the likes of UFC and Paramount’s recent deal and Netflix’s boxing broadcasts moving away from it, “I’ve seen interviews with other people in boxing, saying, ‘I’m going to get rid of pay per view,’ and then they never do get rid of pay per view. Why? Because it’s impossible. To be able to afford the big stars, they need to be paid really good money and PPV is the only way to monetise.”

Production will be in-house by iVisit, with Pereira keen to recruit, “the best of the best,” for the broadcast. This will include social content, and he said, “we need social to engage with those fans and show them what a magnificent sport boxing is.” The success of Jake Paul’s boxing career inspires Pereira, who himself is more interested in traditional boxing.

“The public hasn’t fallen out of love with boxing. Boxing has left them. Boxing has gone somewhere where the fans aren’t,” he noted. “The boxing world has been very much linked to legacy operators, and legacy ways of looking at things. That has to change.”

He added: “I would love for the big professional athletes that are world champions or potential world champions, to reverse engineer this [influencer popularity]. To make content creators out of amazing athletes that are going to be world champions or are current world champions.

“I think boxers are polished and trained for TV and not trained for social. That’s my opinion. I’m not tarnishing everyone with the same brush, but you can see that the Jake Pauls of this world can get eyeballs all the time. You’ve got to admit that that is an art.”

All of this underpins Pereira’s overall aim, which is to greatly expand the reach of boxing in order to lower prices and big name brands to the sport. He’s inspired by the Premier League’s success in turning football into a financial powerhouse despite it being tarnished by hoolganism and other non fan-friendly behaviour before it launched.

Pereira explained, “It’s the casual fan that funds growth, and they won’t do it if they’ve got to spend £1000 or £500 or £300 on a ticket. With scale, you’re only spending only £30 or £40 a ticket but there’s a huge amount of people there. It becomes affordable, it becomes accessible. You get to take your kids to it. Once you get take your kids to it, it changes and then the sponsors come running, because they want to have that family market money.”

If iVisit does manage to break the world record this summer, which currently stands at 135,132 and was set in 1941, Pereira will certainly be on his way to generating this kind of scale in boxing.