Eric Bischoff discusses WWE's deal with Netflix.
On January 23, WWE announced that Raw will be moving to Netflix, beginning in January 2025. The deal was reported to be worth $10 million over five years.
Speaking on Strictly Business, WWE Hall of Famer Eric Bischoff was asked to share his initial reaction to the news.
“It’s a monster deal, and I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it. It was two big pieces of news. One, Rock joining the Board of Directors of TKO, which is fantastic. The other of course being Netflix. The Netflix deal, it’s funny, with all the conversations that we’ve had about where Raw may go, we’ve talked about Amazon, [that] made a lot of sense because of the ancillary opportunities that came with it. But Netflix has been a real 800-pound gorilla in the streaming space for quite some time. While we didn’t see it coming, it makes a ton of sense for a lot of reasons. What a great day," Bischoff said.
Bischoff was also asked to share his thoughts on the way WWE landed a deal that will bundle SmackDown, NXT, premium live events, documentaries, and additional projects. He highlighted how that was a benefit, and it was also important to see how the deal was a major growth opportunity for WWE internationally.
“Obviously, that’s a big benefit, right. Look at the picture here. I’ve talked about patterns, right, little dots here, little dots there, and you start connecting those dots to come up with a pattern. If you look at what Nick Khan has done over the past year or year and a half, when a lot of these things have been in play or they’ve been developing before they’re announced, but it is clear to me that the growth opportunities for WWE, much like the NFL, are international. Now, what does that mean with Netflix? I don’t know, how about 240 million subscribers in 190 different countries? That’s a big opportunity to grow your international live events, your PLEs, and just establish a broader footprint internationally, beyond the UK and Europe, which has traditionally been a good market. But by going to streaming and not having to rely on cable terrestrial broadcast in countries, for example in Europe, each market within that country has different broadcast standards. This allows WWE, assuming that some of those challenges are still in place, to just circumvent it all. Now, their content is going to be as easily accessed in the UK, France, Germany, I mean, look at the UK. $1.5 billion revenue market for Netflix. It’s the second-largest behind the US for Netflix. That is a massive growth opportunity because there will probably be more people that have access to the product, or it will be easier to watch the product. So it’s just all of about international growth. To me, I think that was probably a reason behind this move, and it’s going to be fascinating to watch," Bischoff said.
Check out Nick Khan's comments about Raw moving to Netflix here.
Click here to see what TKO CEO Ari Emanuel had to say about WWE Raw's looming move to Netflix.
Netflix will have the option to extend the WWE Raw deal. More information is available here.
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