With new deals already signed for SmackDown and NXT, the last piece of the WWE media right puzzle going forward is also a big one: the place WWE Raw will call home for the next few years. One prominent outlet thinks it knows where that will be, and the answer might surprise you.
In his annual Sports Media predictions column for Sports Business Journal (and last, since he’s on his way to Puck News), John Ourand runs down what he thinks will be the big talking points across the sports media landscape for the rest of this year. The one we care about here is what he sees for Raw, which is that it will land with Amazon.
Amazon gets “WWE Raw” rights and keeps the series on Monday nights. This hits an audience of young males, a demo where Amazon believes it sees growth in Prime subscriptions. Plus, it gives the company another night of live programming on Prime Video.
A bit earlier in the column, Ourand mentions a wild card idea, which is that Disney might make a package deal with TKO that would renew ESPN’s UFC rights while also acquiring Raw. He thinks that would place Raw on FX, which is a possibility that has been thrown around throughout the negotiations for a new deal.
Still, Amazon would be a much bigger change for WWE. Taking the company’s flagship show off cable and going streaming-only would be a huge acknowledgement of the state of TV today, a sign that this particular deal is a tipping point for TV vs. streaming overall.
It would mean turning its back on a large, entrenched, older audience that consistently makes Raw one of the top shows on cable, even though that admittedly means less and less with each passing year as less homes have cable. It would signal that WWE is willing to forego what’s worked for decades and embrace the probability that Raw’s audience would get younger while hoping that current trends boost the overall viewership to its present levels over the course of the deal.
It seems like a big risk to take, yet even under the prior leadership of Vince McMahon, WWE has made similarly bold moves. It shifted away from the traditional pay-per-view business to a subscription model before that was commonplace, first with WWE Network and later in partnership with Peacock.
WWE has also embraced the power of social media and shown a willingness to throw in with up and coming players (remember Tout?). Prime Video is a lot more fully entrenched than some of the partners WWE has joined forces with over the past decade.
But what stands out as the wildest aspect of WWE’s media rights deals if this turns out to be true is that the company’s programming lineup would almost be inverted from what one would expect: with Raw on streaming (Amazon), SmackDown on cable (USA) and NXT on network TV (The CW). That’s a status quo that no one would have foreseen even a year ago, but it’s now a possibility as we await word on where Raw will land.