Get ready to watch Big Ten football on Crunchyroll, or whatever.
Soon you won’t be able to find the WWE’s flagship weekly program on cable television. Beginning in 2025, Raw — formerly Monday Night Raw — is headed to Netflix.
The longtime cable staple was a ratings tentpole for the USA, what used to be TNN and, briefly, Sci-Fi Networks. Now it’s headed to streaming thanks to a megadeal that will put the WWE belts alongside Bojack Horseman, Stranger Things and Bridgerton next January. All for the price of $5 billion over 10 years.
This is a story with two narratives. The first is that pro wrestling’s wide appeal is the strongest its been since WWE’s Attitude Era where “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, Degeneration X and various versions of The Undertaker and Mick Foley battled in the squared circle. The world’s biggest promotion has been operating at a different level from both an in-ring and storytelling level, creating a product that’s worth $500 million annually for 52 three-hour programs.
The other is that streaming services aren’t ceding any growth when it comes to live sports — or, in this case, sports entertainment. Raw marks Netflix’s first major foray into both sports and live streaming. It’s far from the first platform to break into the field.
Netflix could not ignore the success of Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football simulcasts. Or the loud grumbling and eventual submission to Peacock’s exclusive broadcast rights of the 2024 Wild Card showdown between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs. And while those programs were handled very differently — Prime’s ability to mesh live advanced stats and predictive analysis added a unique layer to its coverage, while Peacock offered fans the opportunity to see plays three plays behind the box score and various buffering screens — they both served as drivers for new signups in an increasingly fractured streaming landscape.
That’s a big deal for Netflix, who’ll bid adieu to its most-watched property — Stranger Things — this year. Live sports was the one genre missing from its lineup, and while pro wrestling doesn’t have the cache of the NFL or NBA or MLB (streaming, occasionally, on Apple TV in the past and likely on Prime going forward) it’s more than a niche broadcast. It’s a part of the zeitgeist, a product that maintains a steady viewership and occasionally reaches greater heights on the shoulders of larger-than-life stars. It’s also a property that won’t be folded into Disney’s empire as the parent company of ESPN and all the over-air and streaming broadcasts that come with that.
This $5 billion deal is another cannon blast in the war for live broadcast rights. It’s terrible news for basic and premium cable channels. The only reliable driver of traditional Nielsen ratings — the metric through which advertising slots are priced and sold — is live sports.
Losing Raw is a bitter pill for the USA Network to swallow, but what happens when Prime or Max or Paramount+ or Netflix make a play for the NBA rights that will be up for bidding in 2025? Prime already has access to the regional networks that carry local MLB and NBA games following the bankruptcy of the brand behind Bally Sports Network; is the company whose goal is to be ubiquitous with selling everything you could ever want going to stop there?
The Pac-12 fell apart, in part, because a television deal with Apple TV couldn’t match the revenue more stable major conferences could offer schools via more traditional media rights deals. That’s something that is going to change significantly by the time Big Ten broadcast rights reset in 2030 or Big 12 rights do a year later. It’s possible we’re looking at a future where Wisconsin-UCLA is shown exclusively in seven minute clips on Quibi (I’m kidding, of course. Quibi died, if I remember correctly, because it couldn’t bear to part with its prosthetic golden arm).
This is great news for sports leagues and a further step into Darwinian survival for traditional networks. Major conference college sports and NFL games could be headed for a streaming service that doesn’t yet exist. Raw’s move to Netflix isn’t the start of this trend, but it’s a sign it won’t slow down.
And as long as the broadcasts are more Amazon Prime Thursday Night Football than Peacock, uh, anything, that’s good for sports fans too.
