Eric Bischoff Calls WWE/Netflix A “Monster Deal,” Talks About Opportunity It Creates For Growth
What did Eric Bischoff think of today’s big news in the world of pro wrestling?
Let’s find out!
On the latest episode of his “Strictly Business” podcast, the WWE Hall of Fame legend and former WCW Executive Vice President shared his elaborate thoughts on the news from today regarding WWE landing a deal with Netflix to bring Monday Night Raw to the service starting in 2025.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the episode where he touches on this topic with his in-depth thoughts.
On 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,”
On his thoughts on the way WWE landed a deal that will bundle SmackDown, NXT, premium live events, documentaries, and additional projects and how that was a benefit and 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.”
Check out the complete episode of the show at Apple.com. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.