WWE live events going to ESPN.
- Thread starter DesotoCountyDawg
- Start date
I think ESPN will eventually MTV themselves.
And I say that as a rasslin' fan.
And I say that as a rasslin' fan.
That sucks. I like being able to watch them for cheap on Peacock. I bet they go the UFC PPV route where you have to be a subscriber to ESPN+ and then also pay an exorbitant fee on top of that for the PPV. The Peacock era has been great.
I'm not going to pay $30 a month to watch WWE PPVs. I didn't in the 90s and 2000s and I'm not going to now.
They're well on their way. They're bringing in the social media influencers. BTW, false advertising on the article title. She's not stunning.
https://sports.yahoo.com/article/espn-hires-stunning-social-media-191557862.html
The speculation is they may start putting some of them on their traditional linear channels. I imagine a Wrestlemania or Royal Rumble on ABC or ESPN would do really good ratings and command big sponsorship dollars.
I mean… I’m going to pay for the ESPN DTC anyway because that’s where almost all of Mississippi State’s sports will be streaming. Might as well get my wrasslin’ too.
That said, while I can’t complain too much for $7 a month or whatever, Peacock never really lived up to the WWE Network. The Peacock library always had gaps, you couldn’t favorite specific matches or segments, and the weird 2 hour lookback limit on live events sucked if you started late, so you had to wait hours for the postshow to end and for the replay to be loaded.
Crazy, a few years ago, to get basically all of the WWE’s content, all you needed was WWE Network (for PLEs/PPVs, NXT, old show library, and other specials) and Hulu (for next day Raw, Smackdown, 205 Live, and Main Event).
Now, you need:
Netflix for Raw and some of the old library
Satellite/cable/MVPD with USA Network for Smackdown
The CW for NXT
Peacock for PLEs, Saturday Night’s Main Event, Main Event, and some of the old library
Tubi TV for Evolve
Satellite/cable/MVPD with A&E for LFG, Rivals, & Biography
Next year, you’ll have to add ESPN for the PLEs.
Same. But I just cancelled Peacock anyway. Got to make room for college football (not Notre Dame).
I could see it. Wrestlemania has been drawing 2-3 million accounts per night on Peacock in the US for the past few years, which is the audience this deal would be capturing (International will still be on Netflix).
Outside of the women’s college basketball national championship, April is generally a low ratings month for ESPN (NHL & NBA Regular season, UFL, college baseball/softball), so Wrestlemania comes at a good time for them.
Yep, it went from the $9.99/mo WWE Network service that only showed wrestling to an even cheaper alternative(Peacock) that also happened to have a lot more content. It's been great
Now, I'm nervous that this is going to go one of two ways.
1) ESPN will offer some ultra premium service that includes WWE, NFL Network, and RedZone, and it will be much more expensive than what we're paying today
2) Even worse, they do what I mentioned above but also absorb current ESPN+ content as well, meaning that those of us that are just paying a few bucks/month for our baseball games and whatnot will now have to pony up in order to keep watching them
I'll do anything to not watch ESPN+. It has to be the absolute worst streaming app of all time. It couldn't be any more difficult to find what you want to watch, then when you finally do, it forgets your tv provider and makes you login again. Then after I login it tells me I need to purchase ESPN+ to watch live content when I'm motherfukcing already paying for it.
I continue to be curious how well these new DTC’s that ESPN and FOX are rolling out on August 21st are going to do. The idea of saving money compared to other services and cutting out channels I don’t care about does sound appealing to me, but I don’t have a good sense of how others feel about it.
If you only watch live TV for sports…. I mean this does sound like a decent way to save some money every month. Especially if you pair it with a decent antenna that can pick up local channels.
In a world where YouTube TV is now almost $100 a month when it was half that a few years ago…. Very curious to see how DTC and skinny bundles fare.
If you only watch live TV for sports…. I mean this does sound like a decent way to save some money every month. Especially if you pair it with a decent antenna that can pick up local channels.
In a world where YouTube TV is now almost $100 a month when it was half that a few years ago…. Very curious to see how DTC and skinny bundles fare.
They are relaunching a new ESPN app in two weeks. Curious to see how much of an improvement it is. I agree with you that the current app sucks.
The question is if you watch it on ESPN+, will you have to revalidate your credentials between the Saturday and Sunday Wrestlemania show even though you are watching ON THE SAME 17N DEVICE ON THE SAME 17N WIFI NETWORK. Literally the two other applications that are part of the bundle do not do that and I may go months between watching Hulu or Disney Plus. ESPNs UI has always been garbage for anything digital going back to being part of the Go Network.
And the WWE/ESPN deal is only 10 events over 12 nights (Wrestlemania and SummerSlam being 2-night events).