When I was a kid, I loved professional wrestling. In 1991, at the age of ten, I asked to stay up late with my dad to watch my favorite wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior, take on Randy Savage, the Macho King, in a must-retire match at WrestleMania 7 .But it was a school night and he said no. Instead, he recorded it for me on VHS. The next day, I jumped out of bed and asked him not to tell me what had happened. Then I asked him what had happened. My father smiled and said, “You'll enjoy it.” And, despite the fact that the Warrior takes Rap no less than five elbows in a row from the top rope, I did.
In 1991, the only way to watch such a match was on pay-per-view television, in which viewers pay a fee to watch an event as it is broadcast live. Vince McMahon, the impresario who, in the early eighties, bought his father's small, northeastern pro-wrestling company and turned it into a publicly traded, billion-dollar sports-entertainment group, used live broadcasts on network television and later on cable television, to propel wrestling into pop culture by gaining die-hard fans who would pay to watch the live events. Last year, McMahon's company, World Wrestling Entertainment, hosted twelve pay-per-view events. it would cost a fan about six hundred and fifty dollars to watch them all.
But in January, WWE announced it would begin airing all pay-per-view events, additional programming and ultimately thousands of hours of archival footage from 1979. “I think any good entertainment product has to change with the times.” , said McMahon, the president and CEO Times. The material — including WWE's flagship event, WrestleMania, which took place Sunday in New Orleans — has been available online since February for $9.99 a month. It can be accessed through WWE's website and on nearly all devices, including an app for phones and tablets, and on streaming boxes like Roku and gaming devices like Xbox 360 and PlayStation.
The launch of the WWE Network was received with joy by wrestling fans. In a conversation at the Grantland website, the site's editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons, and a reporter named David Shoemaker, who writes under the name Masked Man, couldn't believe they could access so much for less than ten dollars a month. (The NFL and Major League Baseball charge twenty dollars or more for monthly digital access to their games, and that's without archival material like the WWE Network offers.) “Ultimately, I think the WWE Network will carry the entire history of wrestling — everything ,what's on videotape. basically,” Simmons said. “Like the best organized YouTube channel ever, only with superior video quality and everything checked for quality.” Shareholders also seemed pleased when, at launch, WWE predicted that the new network could eventually attract two to three million subscribers, generating up to three hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue. The company said it hoped to reach at least one million new subscribers by the end of 2014, which is pretty modest. Netflix has thirty-three million users in the US alone.
This winter, WWE stock hit a record high, doubling in the months following the WWE Network announcement. Although the company's pay-per-view business had declined, no one expected that McMahon would move so radically and so quickly. WWE's new offering is important to the cable and satellite industry because it represents a new approach that bypasses the traditional system. Could McMahon be leading the way in a new business model for how network shows are viewed and consumed?
For years, cable subscribers have paid monthly bills to companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which then pass a portion of that revenue to the broadcasters that provide their programming, including wrestling matches. HBO, for example, gets about $7.77 per subscriber per month, while Disney's ESPN gets about $6, according to estimates by research firm SNL Kagan. In either case, that's less than what the WWE Network will receive from each subscriber. “WWE is one of the early drivers of this new model, where audiences are buying into a number of different subscription streams to put together the kind of programming they want,” Cynthia Meyers, a Mount Saint Vincent College professor who analyzes the evolving inside business models, he told me.
Not surprisingly, some broadcasters are unhappy with McMahon's approach: his new offering will compete with what WWE offers via cable and satellite television. After WWE announced its plans, Dish Network pulled all pay-per-view wrestling promotions. (McMahon said it would be “stupid” for cable and satellite operators to no longer have pay-per-view. , “Raw” and “Smackdown,” WWE has yet to reach a renewal deal with the cable networks that air those shows (USA for “Raw” and SyFy for “Smackdown,” both owned by Comcast affiliates).
For any content producer, a move like WWE's will inevitably cause friction with cable companies—which is problematic because those companies are still responsible for delivering programming to many viewers. “Media history is full of what historians refer to as 'residual' media, which persist well beyond their period of dominance,” Shawn VanCour, a visiting assistant professor of media, culture and communication at the University, told me. of New York. -post office. “If cable is now an 'old' medium whose dominance is being displaced (and that remains a big 'if' at this point), it would be one of many such old media that remains in active use.” And there's no guarantee that a first-mover advantage will work in a company's favor. On Monday, WWE announced that it has signed up more than six hundred and sixty seven thousand subscribers so far. That was less than the eight hundred thousand that analysts had, on average, was foreseen; WWE stock fell more than twenty percent in the following days.
And, while the method of delivery changes, the content itself often remains surprisingly unchanged, even as the decades pass. In May 1985, when the WWE, then known as the WWF, debuted on NBC's “Saturday Night's Main Event,” wrestling was a rarity on network television. The main event was a match between McMahon's biggest star, Hulk Hogan, and Cowboy Bob Orton. WrestleMania30, which took place last Sunday, was headlined by Orton's son Randy. A day earlier, the Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig, was finally inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. I felt nostalgic seeing a new generation respond to my hero, who now had gray hair and appeared without his trademark. I felt it again, more painfully, when, two days later, it was announced that Warrior had died suddenly. The first person I wrote with the news was my father.
Photo: Jonathan Bachman/AP
