iFL TV

About iFL TV

Words by Julian Cole

iFL TV is British boxing’s ringside wire: the YouTube channel whose cameras are everywhere the British fight game happens — and have been since 2010, when co-founders Kugan Cassius and James Helder turned a filming hobby called “I Film London” into the sport’s most relentless interview operation. Press conferences, weigh-ins, open workouts, fight-week hotels, the morning after: if it happened in UK boxing, iFL filmed it first.

The access is the product. The channel’s interview roster reads like a who’s who of modern British boxing: Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury, Tony Bellew, and promoter Eddie Hearn — whose long, candid, frequently profane sit-downs with Kugan became appointment viewing in their own right. The Hearn interviews are the channel’s signature format: no handlers, no time limits, the most powerful man in British boxing answering for everything, usually within hours of the news breaking.

Kugan Cassius is the engine. Six-foot-five, a former Pizza Hut worker turned bodyguard for Ricky Hatton, turned actor (The Hatton Garden Job, Big Fat Gypsy Gangster, Holby City), turned the most recognizable interviewer in British boxing. The backstory is the brand: a fan who filmed his way inside, then never left. His interviewing style — direct, unhurried, unafraid of the awkward silence — gets answers the broadcasters don’t.

The name is a fossil: I Film London, from the days when two guys with a camera covered London fight nights for love. The rebrand to iFL TV kept the initials and lost the geography, because the channel outgrew both — Kugan’s interview trail now runs through Philadelphia, Miami, New York, and Riyadh whenever the sport’s center of gravity moves.

The Hearn dynamic deserves its own chapter. No promoter in boxing history has been interviewed as often, as long, or as candidly as Eddie Hearn has been by iFL — hundreds of sit-downs across a decade, from Matchroom’s rise to the DAZN era to the Saudi chapter. The running joke — “you’ll get the truth on Tuesday” — became part of boxing’s vocabulary. It’s the longest interview series in the sport, and it lives on a YouTube channel.

The scale crept up on everyone. By 2013 iFL had solidified as the go-to British boxing channel on YouTube; the years since brought more than half a billion total views, a podcast feed running hundreds of episodes deep, William Hill sponsorship, and an association with MTK Global. It paved the way for the entire genre of British boxing YouTube — the imitators all film the same rooms iFL filmed first.

The channel’s timing was perfect twice: first for YouTube’s boxing boom, then for the sport’s globalization. When the heavyweight division became the center of world sports — Joshua, Fury, Usyk — iFL was already in the room, already trusted, already rolling. Access compounds; sixteen years of showing up buys you the seat nobody else gets.

What iFL understood before the industry did: boxing’s real content isn’t the fight, it’s the seventy-two hours around it. The channel built its empire on the in-between — the scrum, the staredown, the 1 a.m. reaction video — and in doing so became part of the sport’s infrastructure. Promoters schedule around iFL’s cameras now. Fighters expect the mic in their face. The wire became the institution.

Sixteen years in, the proposition hasn’t changed: iFL TV films stuff. The stuff just happens to be British boxing history, as it happens.

The modern era has given the channel its biggest stages. As boxing’s center of gravity shifted — the Saudi cards in Riyadh, the undisputed heavyweight fights, the Conor Benn saga and its endless plot twists — iFL was already credentialed, already trusted, already in the room. The operation that started with two guys and a camera now covers the sport on multiple continents, but the method never changed: be there early, stay late, ask the question everyone’s thinking.

The motto says it plainly: “We Film Stuff.” It’s on the branding, the thumbnails, the merch — and it’s the mission statement. No hot takes for their own sake, no manufactured beef, just relentless documentation. The podcast network, the hundreds of episodes, the daily uploads during fight week: it’s a volume business built on the belief that boxing fans want everything, and they want it now.

The legacy is the template. British boxing YouTube — the whole genre of ringside channels, scrum interviews, and instant reaction videos — runs on rails iFL laid down. Every imitator films the same rooms, chases the same access, and runs into the same truth: sixteen years of showing up can’t be shortcut. Kugan Cassius didn’t just cover British boxing’s modern era; for a lot of fans, his camera is how they experienced it.