San Francisco Business Times - GoFish Starts Martial Arts Network

GoFish Starts Martial Arts Network

Internet video company GoFish Corp. will start a martial arts channel on June 7

San Francisco Business Times
Steven EF Brown
June 4, 2007

San Francisco-based GoFish (OTCBB: GOFH) will focus the channel, called "MMA Today," on so-called "mixed martial arts," a popular television sport. Bas Rutten, a mixed martial arts fighter and commentator will host some of the shows on the channel.

In mixed martial arts events, athletes wearing gloves to protect their knuckles and mouthguards to protect their teeth compete in a ring using a combination of techniques from boxing, wrestling and from kicking styles of martial arts like Muay Thai, or kickboxing. The bouts have different rules depending on the group sponsoring them, but they typically prohibit things like strikes or kicks to the groin or poking fingers in the eyes.

Mixed martial arts, or MMA, gained popularity in the 1990s with televised events like the "Ultimate Fighting Championship," where martial artists of different styles fought against each other. The sport has become more regularized and regulated since that time, and its popularity has spawned many schools focused on teaching combinations of martial arts.

The sport is very popular in Japan, and MMA events have drawn large pay-per-view audiences.

GoFish said Monday that its channel will have shows on training, interviews with fighters, as well as competitions.

Ann Marie Lynch, one of the channel's producers, said she and partner John Corry, based near Studio City in Los Angeles, have been working very hard to get material ready for the channel's June 7 launch.

"On fight weekends I work about 17-hour days for three days," she said. "Two weeks ago I had over 100 interviews."

Lynch, who became interested in MMA as a sports reporter, said the channel is still working out some last-minute wrinkles, like a delay in review and approval of an FTP site used to upload programs from China. That should take another week, Lynch said.

"We're in a constant state of uploading right now," she said.