WWE Network Showing Massive Signs Of Promise – Forget What You Read Otherwise

The WWE has been going through a period that many top companies have to go through from time to time. They have to lay off quite a few workers, cutting & trimming the budget quite a bit, & basically trimming the “fat” off of the company in order for it to work efficiently.

That business practice has never been more evident for the company than with the launch of the WWE Network. It was announced on Thursday that the WWE Network has 700,000 subscribers to its service, which is currently only available in the United States. While many analysts believe that this is a low subscriber number, it actually isn’t bad at all.

Streaming networks are still a very new practice around the world & the technology is still being worked on to make them stronger, but WWE is not doing anything different than what Netflix & Hulu Plus had to do when they first started their streaming services, especially Netflix, which was originally just renting out DVDs for customers.

This week, the WWE had to cut 7% of their workforce in an on going effort to get $20 million off of their budget, which im guessing is either to save actual money or free up some extra cash to put back into the Network, which will end up being a complete cash cow in the next year or so. The company understands that this is the future of entertainment as we know it, but getting there is obviously no easy task.

The WWE Network recorded 700,000 subscribers as of June 30. That number should increase significantly with the international expansion beginning on August 12.

On Thursday, WWE announced that the Network will be going international beginning on August 12. The service will be available in Australia, Canada, Russia, Spain, Nordic countries, New Zealand, Mexico, & Latin American nations. It will be available to other nations in October 2014 & in the U.K. around the beginning of 2015.

The WWE will get to the 1 million subscriber mark that is being used to break even & turn a profit with the network, that part is not to be questioned. The WWE is huge around the world & if you were to go on Twitter, fans consistently write about when they will be able to have the WWE Network in their country. Many fans, however, have been able to use various devices & programs that allow for users to hide their local IP address & access the network, which the WWE will undoubtedly sure up as time goes on.

In Canada, the rollout of the WWE Network will be very unique, in that it will be an actual paid cable channel on Rogers, the big cable provider in Canada. WWE signed a new 10-year deal that will keep their flagship shows, Monday Night Raw & Friday Night Smackdown, available on the network & the WWE Network itself will be a paid channel, similar to what HBO is. The on-demand content will then be able on the internet based channel, exactly what the WWE Network is in America, but a better comparison will be HBO Go for the Canadian customers.

The regular paid channel will carry the WWE Network streaming programming lineup, with everything still being archived later.

The media has always had a thing against the WWE because of not understanding how the “wrestling” business worked. They could never understand what drew so many people into watching something that is so “scripted” & “fake” & why people spend hard earned money on this type of entertainment. So when the WWE Network launched, the pundits were already trying to find a way to rip it & let the world know that it wouldn’t or couldn’t survive.

They didn’t understand that WWE Chairman Vince McMahon is one of the most ingenious people of this generation. Yes, some of his business practices haven’t always been on the up & up, but who’s really is? McMahon had enough foresight to see that Pay-Per-View was the way of the future with entertainment & was one of the first companies to put sports on PPV, before boxing was available in that medium.  The same guy made Wrestlemania into one of the biggest events of all time after taking a major gamble on the event being a success back in 1985 with Wrestlemania 1.

30 years later, we are at Wrestlemania 30, being in the biggest stadiums around the country & now it gets ready for Wrestlemania 31, which will be held next year at the new Levi’s Stadium, the home of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers.

In fact, Wrestlemania was the first major event to be shown on the WWE Network & it went off very smoothly. The company knows what its doing with this channel, despite what the other internet pundits might want you to believe. Im not saying this because I am a wrestling fan, but as an internet & tech guy, this is going on the perfect path to success right now.

The company did announce that there would be a change in the pricing for the network at some point – the price would be either $20 per month or $60 for an entire 6-month subscription, which many people actually have been asking for for quite a long time. Many people didn’t like the idea that they were committed to paying $9.99 per month for 6-months due to not wanting to have that on their cards or just flat out being cheap (many wrestling fans love to watch things that stream online for free with crappy service most times instead of just playing the fee & being able to watch so much more).  For the life of me, I have never fully understood that idea of watching entertainment, but I digress.

The company is still in solid standing, & again, nothing that any other company doesn’t have to go through when they are launching something that is very revolutionary. It’s the exact same thing that the NFL is doing with their new NFL Now package, which will have games available as well as other NFL Network content available on demand through a streaming service. Major League Baseball has done the same thing, & other companies as well. The Watch ESPN app & the ESPN3 app on Xbox 360 & Xbox One has been a major source of revenue for the ESPN brand & has allowed them to carry far more sports than their regular TV networks can handle at one time.

The big difference is that all of those leagues have some kind of cable deal for their actual channels. While WWE has a TV deal with NBC Universal, they have yet to launch a cable or satellite deal in the United States, which they may not for a while. If they were to at some point, it would be a complete game changer & bring in more revenue, but at the same time, it would cause WWE to have to split revenue with the cable providers & in Canada, its a bit different simply because there aren’t as many competitors for cable there & not as much distribution of profit would have to be sent to as many companies.

Along with the distribution of the WWE Network worldwide, some of the biggest documentary series will be coming up shortly in August for the company. The highly anticipated series, The Monday Night War, will be available along with the show, WWE Rivalries, which will give in-depth analysis of the hottest feuds & matches in the history of the wrestling industry.

The Monday Night War, in particular, will be the series that most wrestling fans will probably get the Network for because for many, it was the golden age of wrestling for this generation during the rivalry of WWE against WCW with their respective shows, WWE Monday Night Raw & WCW Monday Nitro going head-to-head against each other.

The WWE Network isn’t perfect, but it has strong satisfactory ratings & will only continue to grow more as time goes on. Until you look at the numbers that the network will draw in in the long term, the pundits can’t speak on WWE getting smacked down or not so early in the game.