Photo: Naoki Fukuda

Tammy Ross recently announced she was stepping down on Saturday after working for HBO Pay-Per-View for the past 17 years. She helped shepherd through Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s historic bout with Manny Pacquiao last May. She was involved with Mike Tyson’s heavyweight championship with Lennox Lewis in 2002.

Ross, who was not authorized to talk about her departure until today, said she had already decided in her mind that she was leaving before the third fight between Pacquiao and Tim Bradley, which happens tonight on HBO Pay-Per-View, was announced in December. But after the first two fights didn’t exactly light up Las Vegas, it reinforced her notion that the PPV business – the one she was leaving – was in need of a major overhaul. As were her career aims.

“I will say that when Pacquiao announced that he was fighting Bradley again, for me, it really did shine a spotlight for me that it was time to do something different,” Ross told RingTV.com in a phone interview on Saturday. “I wasn’t getting fulfillment out of doing the same fights over and over and over again. Any time you do something for the third time you wonder, ‘Should we be?'”

Added Ross, “If Manny Pacquiao won’t move on and fight someone else it’s time for me to kind of move on. I could watch Pacquiao fight (Juan Manuel) Marquez 20 times and never get bored. This particular fight just told me, ‘You know what? We need to do something different here.'”

Whatever her reasons for leaving HBO, Ross did not base her criticism entirely on Pacquiao-Bradley, nor does she think the pay-per-view prototype is broken. She just thinks it’s at a major turning point. From exorbitant prices to barren undercards to the changing ways people consume media, Ross anticipates a major shift in how people get their boxing in the future.

“I do think that the boxing pay-per-view model is really at a crossroads right now of almost where it was at in the infancy of pay-per-view,” said Ross. “It needs to decide if it’s going to be an over-the-top (internet content without involvement of multiple-system operators), or it’s going to be the model that it is with the affiliates driving the cart. I also think the pricing is going to be a very big issue going forward. The more events you have, the pricing has just gotten so high. When we were doing smaller fights such as (Erik) Morales and (Marco Antonio) Barrera and Pacquiao when they were young — the prices were lower at $39.99 or $44.99 and the cards were stacked with great fighters.”

HBO declined to comment for this story and Ross added that her next job would not be in boxing. She doesn’t believe the PPV industry will ever go away. It just needs to evolve.

“Whether people realize it or not, every time they go online, they’re pay-per-viewing something, whether they’re paying for their broadband bill each month or buying a show on Apple or iTunes,” Ross said. “It’s just the evolution of the dinosaur that was originally pay-per-view, which is you take out your remote control or you call your customer service rep and you order. I think the concept of pay-per-view has evolved and will continue to evolve greatly in the next years, especially as the millennials start to make choices as to how they’re going to view content, whether it’s always paying for what they want to watch or bundling.”

Ross predicts the PPV business will grow as pay-television develops.

“I think pay-television is going to evolve as almost like a free-for-all where Verizon (and other communication companies are) going to go after their own customers,” she said. “It won’t be geographic any longer. I think pay-per-view will go along with that model and I think again, what people don’t realize is that they pay-per-view all the time now. I think the technology will just change as to how they access their content and how much they pay for it. It won’t be as focused as it is now. I think it’s going to be a lot of spaghetti against the wall.”

Despite the challenges ahead, Ross doesn’t think the PPV business is dead. Attaining a million buys isn’t out of the question. In other words, the PPV era isn’t over, she says.

“I actually see it as a different era,” Ross said. “We’ve been through a lot of evolutions before where we haven’t had million-buy fighters and we’re fortunate that Canelo Alvarez is coming up and will be the new Oscar De La Hoya of million-buy fights. I don’t think there’s ever an end of any era.”