The next phase in the UFC’s plan to ascend to a higher plane of profitability may have hit a snag. According to a report from “Sports Business Journal,” the exclusive negotiating period between the UFC and current TV partner FOX has ended, and the UFC has thus far failed to attract a flood of interest from other potential bidders.

Part of it is the price tag. As outlined in investor documents last summer, the UFC’s new owners are banking on a huge increase in rights fees to help justify the company’s enormous price tag.

The current deal with FOX, which ends in 2018, brings in an average of $120 million a year, with the price jumping to $160 million in the final year.

For its next deal? The UFC reportedly wants $450 million per year – a nearly threefold increase of the peak price under the current deal. At present, FOX, according to SBJ, is prepared to make an offer of $200 million a year. Not quite the leap the UFC’s owners at Endeavor were hoping for.

So what does the UFC of the very near future stand to offer a TV partner? And how could the drive for a huge price increase affect the way fans watch UFC fights once the FOX deal expires? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answers to these two questions could have a lot of overlap.

With the UFC comes tons of content and a very loyal audience

If we’ve learned anything from the UFC’s wandering broadcast positions over the years (hey, remember Versus?), it’s that hardcore fans will follow the UFC wherever it goes.

Seriously, make up a new channel. Call it whatever you want. Put it way out there on the cable TV hinterlands, sandwiched between car shows and the network that only plays ’80s miniseries. MMA fans will grumble about it and mock it relentlessly, but come fight time we’ll find our way there. And if you’re lacking programming, just dig into the UFC’s vault. If there’s an upside to the UFC over-saturation of recent years, it’s the accumulation of hours and hours of content.

All of that is appealing to any broadcast partner trying to draw eyes to a new network or streaming service – or both. Which leads us to the next point…

UFC fans are already accustomed to a variety of viewing platforms

An online stream, a cable TV channel, and a pay-per-view broadcast? That’s a fairly normal Saturday night for an MMA fan, jumping from one platform to the next. The UFC has already gotten its fans used to streaming live content (case in point, Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 122 event from Shanghai), and for the right broadcast partner, that’s a big boost.

Maybe that explains why Turner Sports is said to be one of the more interested parties so far. Turner is a subsidiary of Time Warner, which is at the center of a suddenly troubled merger with AT&T. If the merger goes through, as the Sports Business Journal report notes, the new company “could let DirecTV handle the UFC’s pay-per-view, AT&T oversee UFC’s mobile apps, and Turner use UFC content on its channels and (over-the-top) platform.”

The big problem there is the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block the merger. Critics say it’s a sharp shift in antitrust policy from the U.S. government, and point to President Donald Trump’s frequent criticism of CNN, which Time Warner also owns, as the real explanation for the pushback.

The uncertainty over that merger may take a key player out of UFC negotiations, at least for a while. If AT&T has to sell DirecTV, or Time Warner has to unload Turner in order to get approval, suddenly the ability to leverage the UFC across multiple platforms might seem less attractive.

But what, exactly, would you get if you spend hundreds of millions on UFC broadcast rights?

Here’s where it gets really tricky. The UFC has the power to draw many millions of viewers with the right offering, but there are several tiers to UFC programming, and just because you pay for TV rights doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the good stuff.

Look at the FOX deal. Events on the big FOX network started with a UFC heavyweight title fight that drew nearly 9 million viewers, but the quality of the cards soon dipped and ratings fell with it. The most recent UFC on FOX event, in July, drew some of the lowest ratings in series history. And while the UFC Fight Night events on FS1 are far more frequent, they clearly don’t represent the best content the UFC has to offer.

As of now, the UFC still relies heavily on pay-per-view, which is the company’s single-biggest driver of revenue. The investor pitch didn’t call for a new TV rights deal that would replace that revenue, but rather add to it. That makes you think that the UFC has no plans of putting its few reliable pay-per-view draws on regular old TV, so why would a network spend $450 million a year just to get the UFC’s leftovers?

Earlier reports have suggested that a new deal might have to come with a share in pay-per-view revenues, or at least more of a say in which bouts go where. That could be good news for fans who are feeling the financial strain of buying all those pay-per-views, and it could also help the UFC’s growth if its best and most interesting fighters get seen by more potential fans.

The problem is finding the right deal that makes the best use of all that the UFC has to offer – and for the exorbitant price Endeavor is asking.

As you may recall, one of the justifications for the huge bump in price was the lack of other available sports properties up for grabs in the next few years. In other words, UFC owners were expecting a lot of competition among networks, and with more bidders and fewer items up for sale, they expected prices to skyrocket.

So far, however, it doesn’t seem like the bids are flowing quite as expected. If that doesn’t change it might mean it’s time to adjust the price – or the offer that goes along with it.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.