On Tuesday, WWE announced that Netflix will be the home of WWE Raw beginning in January 2025. The deal was announced as a ten-year agreement.
In the SEC filing, it was noted that Netflix has the option to extend the deal an additional ten years or opt out after five years.
In an interview with Stratechery, Netflix CEO Greg Peters comments on the deal.
"We love this deal for a whole variety of reasons. One is that the one you mentioned, which we think that this is quite close to what we do. We think we are in the business of telling dramatic stories around sports. You’ve seen it with Drive to Survive or Break Point, Full Swing," he said. "We feel that’s a space that we’ve earned the right to play and an expectation to deliver value to consumers, and we feel like this is in that zone. We also love it, because as you mentioned, this is 52 weeks of entertainment. This is always on entertainment, sports entertainment, and it fits really well within our model. We think it’s synergistic with what we’re doing on ads, and we like it from that perspective.
"What we believe is that there’s a real opportunity for growing the fan base for this set of content globally. We think it’s been under-distributed, we think it’s been under-leveraged. There’s good signs that there’s fans out there, but we think we can grow that. We think about it as the inverse to Drive to Survive to F1. We could actually grow the international audience in a way that is material. We’ve organized the deal so that it’s a big long-term deal. In other words, there’s a little bit of risk insulation into the renting concerns that you mentioned before."
When asked about the option to potentially opt out, Peters replied, "Yeah. Again, I think it’s part of recognition that we brought a lot of value and potential value to it. We were able to negotiate reasonable optionality in that regard, which we like, because it gives us a little bit of room to learn and also to extend if we like where it’s going. And then, to your point about renting, we love sports. I mean, sports is some of the most compelling content out there, but in the same reason that it’s compelling, it’s also poorly substitutable, that means that you’re de-leveraged relative to the rights holder. There’s a spectrum of those things. I would say WWE is more towards the substitutable spectrum than, let’s say, NFL or NBA or things like that, but Friends is relatively non-substitutable as well. It probably sits somewhere in the same space."
Fans can learn more about WWE Raw moving to Netflix by clicking here.
Fans can find Nick Khan's comments about Netflix and WWE working together on programming outside of WWE Raw by clicking here.
