January 9th, 2014
This is an interesting development: The WWE is creating its own channel–but not on cable. Instead of going with an NFL Network style cable channel, they’ve decided to do an over-the-top web channel, which will be streamed to Roku/Playstation/Android/Apple/etc. The service launches next week. A few points:
1) The Variety story seems contradictory in saying that subscriptions are $9.95 a month and will include PPV access, but that the WWE expects $600 in revenue per year from each subscription. Maybe the PPVs will be in-app purchases? It’s a little unclear.
2) The most interesting aspect of this is to what extent the WWE network will cannibalize existing revenue from TV deals and PPV. My sense–and this is just a guess–is that the company wouldn’t be making such a bold move if they thought there was lots of growth left in those areas. Instead, this seems like a hedge to protect declining revenues by cutting out middlemen.
3) Variety points to the influence of MLB, but it seems to me that the much more consequential influence in Glenn Beck’s Blaze, which continues to be almost criminally underreported as a business story. (For instance, in this otherwise good piece about conservative new-new media, note how little attention is given to it.)
4) This move is actually consistent with what HHH told Grantland in August when asked about a WWE network:
The question you probably always get after the Hall of Fame is the WWE television channel.
If I had to say what is one priority we think about on a daily basis, that is one of them. But it’s not so easy to put together. It’s not the NFL Network. You have to think about how our business is different. Don’t look at us as a Mayweather or De La Hoya fight, look at it asRocky. Rocky is a movie that just happens to be about boxing. It’s really about characters and story lines and relationships and all those things, and the backdrop is boxing. You can go back and watch the final fight in Rocky a thousand times. If you dig that movie, if you like the characters, you’ll watch the whole movie over and over.
But that’s a very limited number of people that go back and watch boxing matches, unless it’s like the Thrilla in Manila. But to go back and just watch a regular boxing match, or a Super Bowl, what’s the implications of that now? It doesn’t mean anything. Our stuff is different.
Nedward January 9, 2014 at 5:18 pm
In the future every show will be famous to 15 people, like that HBO horse-racing drama(?)… Of course they’re “cannibalizing” the TV contracts, according to these guys “mass culture” is really oldthink Society 1.0. You can’t even watch the Rose Bowl, on a day when literally nothing’s on, because it’s considered logical I’d pay for a 24/7 version of “The View” except hosted by Skip Bayless & Michael Wilbon(?) in order to see games as a side bonus