Triple H says it's going to be more manageable.
WWE Raw will premiere on Netflix on January 6th, and there are still plenty of questions as to the logistics of how the show air on the streaming service. Among others, fans have wondered how commercial breaks will be part of the show.
Speaking on The Press Box, WWE Chief Content Officer Triple H was asked to comment on what WWE's thinking was, and what Netflix's thinking was, regarding having commercials during WWE Raw broadcasts on the streaming service.
“Look, [laughs], my guess on their part would be money is part of this. They’re paying us a lot of money. They’re in the business of making money, so they’ve got to have ad times and they’ve fit to sell things, even though it’s a subscription product. There’s other factors that go into that for them. For us, to some degree, it’s a funny thing. Sometimes, they tell us, for whatever reason, ‘Hey, you can have the entire first hour commercial-free.’ I know that nobody out there that watches the show, unless they do television, will understand this because they hear this and think, ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing ever.’ Commercial-free live television is incredibly difficult. People don’t understand that. To be able to go from, this match ends, you gotta get them out of the arena, you gotta go backstage, you gotta go to this other stuff, you gotta be ready to go on every single thing, in real time, in that moment. If something crashes, if somebody gets injured, there’s no place to go. There’s no commercial to go to. There’s no, ‘Hey, we can go to this.’ You can only go to so many backstage segments. If they’re not ready to go, something happens and you gotta get out in the ring, if no one’s ready to go, ‘Alright, just run a package or something.’ It’s incredibly difficult to do. So having those breaks in there to some degree is helpful. There’s less commercial time. It’s going to be more manageable, at least for now. Anything can change, but at least for now. I also think this will be a work on progress for us. The formatting is slightly different here. How we work with things is slightly different, so it’s gonna take us a minute also to get to where we feel comfortable and we feel smooth getting in and out of everything and going to where we need to go. But I think it’ll be a better experience for people. It’s just a part of what we do. It makes me laugh whenever people say, ‘There’s so many commercials this week.’ Well, same exact amount of commercials we had last week. I’ll give you that maybe we didn’t do as good of a job of managing the time in between the commercials, but it’s the same amount of commercials. We didn’t change anything. The format’s the same," Triple H said.
In January 2024, Alex Sherman of CNBC reported that Netflix subscribers on the standard no-ad plan wouldn't get ads during WWE Raw.
Click here to see what Triple H had to say about the runtime of WWE Raw on Netflix.
Check out Triple H's comments about how moving Raw off of Mondays was considered here.
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