If pay-per-view in boxing is dead, Fox clearly didn’t receive the memo.

The November 23 heavyweight rematch between Deontay Wilder and Luis Ortiz will be distributed by the network, it was announced Saturday at the Errol Spence-Shawn Porter PPV card. Wilder-Ortiz II marks the fourth PPV boxing card for Fox this year. The others were Errol Spence-Mikey Garcia earlier in March and Manny Pacquiao-Keith Thurman in July. And Fox doesn’t plan to stop.

“We are very bullish (on PPVs),” Bill Wanger, the executive vice president of programming for Fox Sports, told Boxing Junkie. Wanger predicts Fox will do four to five PPVs in 2020.

Fox entered into a multi-year deal last December with Premier Boxing Champions, the boxing management firm headed by Al Haymon. Since then, it has showcased nearly all of the top PBC stars on either broadcast TV or PPV – that is, with the exception of the American heavyweight champion.

“We had (Wilder) on Fox a couple of years ago (in 2017) early on in his career,” said Wanger, who first discussed with Haymon the possibility of distributing Wilder-Ortiz II on PPV eight to nine months ago. “But since he’s catapulted himself into the upper echelon of the heavyweight division, we haven’t had him. This is a great fight to have for Fox. He’ll sell the fight tremendously. We look forward to promoting it.”

Streaming services like DAZN are providing an alternative to PPV but it can still be a solid economic model. Spence-Garcia reportedly did a healthy 360,000 buys and Pacquiao-Thurman did a reported 500,000 buys.

However, as committed as Fox may be to PPV, another benefit is the wider potential audience for boxers historically hemmed in by premium cable networks.

“The impetus for us to doing this deal with the PBC was really to bring back boxing to the masses and expose it to a wide audience,” Wanger said. “Almost the past 12 months since we started with the PBC, over 32 million people have seen our content over various channels. Boxing on PBC has never had exposure like this before. That’s the main thrust of our deal, not about PPVs.

“I think this is a great time to be in boxing, especially with the heavyweights and welterweights. There is a long line of great fighters that people really care about. Most of them are with the PBC.”

One longstanding criticism of PPV is that it shuts out casual fans unwilling to pay to see the big fights. Wanger countered by pointing out that the majority of Fox cards will appear on its free channels.

“It’s important to remember that within each year of the PBC deal we’ll have 26, 27 events. The vast majority of those are on free television,” Wanger said. “We have 10 fights on Fox broadcasting and 12 fights a year on FS1, and then four, five pay-per-views a year.”

Fox also has substantial publicity muscle, which Wanger hopes will build the top fighters into PPV stars.

“The fighters have to grow into PPV attractions and putting on Caleb Plant or Julian Williams or the Charlo Twins on Fox broadcasting exposes those fighters to a huge audience that they never would have gotten on HBO, which is in 30 million homes, and Showtime, which is in 25 million homes,” Wanger said. “That is the main goal: to expose these fighters to the widest possible audiences. And, yeah, the biggest ones are going to have pay-per-views.”

That could include a projected joint PPV between ESPN and Fox for the Wilder-Tyson Fury rematch next year, provided Wilder defeats Ortiz in November. Asked whether that potential collaboration is a sign that other cross-promotional fights could be made, such as a fight between, say, Top Rank-promoted Terence Crawford and Spence, Wanger was optimistic – to an extent.

“I think the interesting thing about the Wilder-Fury rematch is that it paves the way toward two different promotions being able to work together,” Wanger said. “Similar to what HBO and Showtime did a decade ago. I view that as a positive. Errol Spence in particular has a lot of great opponents. … We already have a lot of fighters in the PBC stable. The Terence Crawford thing may or may not happen, we’ll find out down the line.”