For a few years, a lot of fight fans started their Saturday night in the same place: r/MMAStreams, a Reddit community where users posted links for each card and voted the working ones to the top. It had about 165,000 members when Reddit closed it in May 2019. Anyone searching for "reddit mma streams" today is looking for something that has been gone for more than seven years.
What r/MMAStreams was
The subreddit never hosted any video. Reddit is a link and discussion site, so the community worked like a bulletin board. A thread went up for each event, commenters pasted links to streams on other websites, and everyone else voted on which ones loaded.
That made it convenient, and it also made it easy to find. Every link sat on a public page with the event name in the title, on a site as large as Reddit. A rights holder did not need to go looking for the streams. They were collected in one place, every fight weekend, with a timestamp.
Why Reddit shut it down
Reddit's content policy tells users to keep it legal, and the company has a repeat infringer policy. When it keeps receiving valid copyright notices about the same account or the same community, it can close the account or the whole subreddit. Its 2019 transparency report says Reddit removed 283 user accounts and 137 subreddits under that policy that year. The 2020 report put the figure at 303 accounts and 514 subreddits.
r/MMAStreams was one of the 2019 removals. TorrentFreak, which covered the closure at the time, reported that the moderators had warned members about a month earlier that the community was "at high risk of being banned for copyright violation" and that they needed to start planning a move. The same report pointed to the timing: the UFC had a new exclusive streaming deal with ESPN+ in the US, and TorrentFreak considered it very likely that the complaints came from that side.
The subreddit also picked up some unwanted attention that spring. On April 14, 2019, former UFC heavyweight Brendan Schaub, who had more than 750,000 followers on Twitter, complained that his ESPN+ stream would not work and joked that he would have to find another way to watch. According to TorrentFreak he received around 2,000 direct messages with pirate links, and he later talked about the Reddit community on his podcast. When the ban arrived a few weeks later, many members blamed him for pointing a spotlight at it.
The copies did not last
Members tried to regroup at r/MMAStreamz, a near-identical name. Reddit banned it the same week, for the same reason. The same thing happened across other sports. Sports Illustrated reported that r/soccerstreams was removed in January 2019, and that r/nbastreams, with about 500,000 users, was banned in June 2019, days after the NBA Finals, following thousands of takedown requests from the league. The NBA told the magazine that it works with vendors to find pirated streams of its games and that platforms closing repeat infringers is a central part of that process.
The same report described where the communities went next: Discord servers, standalone websites and, for a while, new subreddits with slightly different names. The model that made r/MMAStreams easy to use, one public thread per event with the best links voted to the top, was also what made it easy to report.
Where fans watch the UFC now
The biggest change since 2019 is in the US. From 2026, Paramount+ is the exclusive US home of the UFC under a seven-year deal announced on August 11, 2025. It carries all 13 numbered events and 30 Fight Nights on the schedule, and numbered events are included in the subscription with no extra pay-per-view charge. Some numbered cards are also shown on CBS. For UFC 326 on March 7, 2026, CBS aired the last hour of the prelims and the first hour of the main card, from 8 to 10 p.m. ET.
Dana White's Contender Series and The Ultimate Fighter moved to Paramount+ too, in the US, Latin America and Australia. Outside those markets the picture depends on the country, and pay-per-view has not disappeared everywhere. UFC.com's viewing guide for UFC 331 in September listed the main card on pay-per-view in several markets, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK and Ireland, and told fans in markets without a TV partner to check UFC Fight Pass, the UFC's own streaming service.
Other promotions have their own deals. PFL events air in the US on ESPN platforms: PFL Chicago on October 16, 2026 has its main card on ESPN2, and the PFL's cards in Dubai and Lyon later in the year are on the ESPN app.
A practical point for anyone who used to rely on the subreddit's timestamps: UFC events are split into early prelims, prelims and a main card, and outside the US each part can sit on a different channel. In Canada, for UFC 331, the early prelims were on UFC Fight Pass, the prelims on Sportsnet and TVA Sports, and the main card on pay-per-view. UFC.com publishes a viewing guide for each event that lists every part by country, and our guide to how to watch UFC in 2026 covers the broadcaster in each major market.
What MMABite does
The most useful thing the old subreddit did was tell people what was on and when. That part still makes sense. Our UFC schedule lists every upcoming numbered card, Fight Night and Contender Series episode with start times in Eastern Time, and each part of a card gets its own row. If you landed here looking for the old community, the Reddit MMA streams page puts the current week's MMA cards in one list.
MMABite does not host any video. Start times can shift when an earlier fight runs long or a bout drops off a card, so check the time in the table on the day of the event.
