The Netflix-WWE Tag Team is a Championship-Worthy Pairing
The $10 billion deal for "Raw" gives Netflix a perfect property to expand into live events. It also confirms pro wrestling's position as one of the most innovative industries in U.S. media history.
Linear television received a steel chair shot from a long-time partner this week. Netflix and WWE announced a 10-year, $5 billion deal (with an early extension or opt-out option in year five) for the live rights to Raw, the sports entertainment giant’s 31-year-old weekly series, beginning in January 2025.1
Despite its peculiar position in pop culture, pro wrestling remains a relatively reliable programming format for television networks. USA Network’s three-hour Raw broadcast is consistently one of the top non-Monday Night Football series on cable. Fox’s Friday Night Smackdown is a similarly strong performer for its (admittedly weakened) Friday timeslot. Even WWE’s insurgent competitor AEW does solid business for TBS and TNT with five hours of grappling action.
But a year from now, Raw, the most popular wrestling show and U.S. television’s “longest-running weekly episodic program,” will leave television altogether. 2WWE will continue its relationship with USA Network thanks to a new agreement for Smackdown. Still, the company will now forever be associated with Netflix’s big and long-speculated expansion into live programming. While Raw won’t be the first live offering on the Netflix platform—the streamer has experimented with Chris Rock stand-up specials and a synergistic competition between F1 drivers and golfers—it will be the first ongoing live show.
The agreement generated a new round of prognostication about what this means for Netflix’s future interest in other live programming like sports. Two weeks ago, Netflix and the NBA announced a forthcoming docuseries similar to Quarterback, the popular behind-the-scenes NFL series that debuted in 2023. Conveniently, the NBA’s broadcast rights deal is up this year, and anonymous industry sources speculators are certain that at least some of the games are headed to streaming. The NBA’s young international audience is assuredly appealing to Netflix as the latter continues to expand around the world. A year of experimentation and trouble-shooting with Raw would help Netflix establish a steady infrastructure for streaming NBA games to begin in the fall of 2025.
Though I love to speculate about the future as much as the next newsletter writer, it’s worth emphasizing that anyone who’s paid attention to WWE and pro wrestling for the past fifty years could have seen this big move coming. Amid its immense corruption and depravity, the industry has navigated technological change to keep the product in front of new generations of audiences. To wit:
Georgia Championship Wrestling (GCW) distributed a national wrestling show via satellite on WTCG, the Ted Turner-owned station that would later become TBS, as early as 1976.
Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP) and then-WWF used closed-circuit television for major events like Starrcade and WrestleMania as early as 1983.
To promote the first WrestleMania, WWF smartly partnered with MTV, creating a pop culture event out of cable collaboration.
Inspired by the success of WrestleMania, WWF quickly expanded its alternative broadcast options to include annual, and then quarterly, and then monthly pay-per-view events. JCP, its predecessor WCW, and smaller companies followed the same model, generating more than 30 pay-per-view events during the late-nineties peak.
WWF and WCW regularly promoted its AOL and related chat room events, including with on-screen talent, in the mid-nineties.
WCW offered live-streamed “internet pay-per-views” of its major events via the RealPlayer in 1997 and 1998. For $9.99, fans could listen to—but not watch—live in-arena commentary of the company’s usual pay-per-view events. But 1997!
WWE integrated Twitter into its live programming and storytelling in 2011. The company embraced social media so much that it invested in a nascent and ultimately failed social video platform, Tout.
Across the late aughts and early aught-tens, WWE launched an on-demand channel for cable subscribers (24/7), flirted with the creation of a cable channel, and ultimately pivoted into an over-the-top streaming platform, the WWE Network, in 2014. Netflix had 48 million subscribers in 2014. Many Netflix competitors would not be launched for a half-decade.
WWE subsequently cashed in on two related developments among media conglomerates: the inflated prices for live-event programming on television and the desperation for recognizable properties on nascent streamers. In 2018, WWE licensed SmackDown to Fox for $1 billion, and in 2021 it made another $1 billion deal with Peacock to migrate WWE Network programming—including “premium live events” like WrestleMania—to Comcast’s struggling streaming platform.
I’m surely leaving out a few notable examples, but the point is clear. WWE’s stronghold in the industry is partially due to its strategically smart bets on new forms of viewership. Even in this particular case, the company (and its corporate parent TKO) smartly diversified its content across different distribution pathways. It licensed SmackDown to USA Network, maintaining that decades-long partnership, flipped its third brand NXT to The CW, and made history with Neftlix and Raw.
Importantly, the Netflix deal includes domestic rights for Raw but international rights for Raw and the premium live events. Meanwhile, Peacock will continue to host those big events, and the larger WWE library, in the U.S. There’s also the weird wrinkle that USA Network will stop airing Raw at the end of September 2024, leaving it technically without a home between October and December before the Netflix deal begins in January 2025. That is bizarre, but it’s also another chance for WWE to make an additional deal for short-term rights that will bring in another round of press coverage and a bump in the stock price.
In a time where media executives have realized that exclusive rights deals don’t work in streaming, WWE has properly situated itself with extensive diversification and countless partnerships.
It’s a big deal that Netflix is serious about live programming. It’s a smart deal that Netflix chose WWE and pro wrestling as the way to do it.
This is TV Plus, a newsletter about television written by Cory Barker, a media studies professor and veteran blogger. Readers can expect dispatches on industry trends, overlooked shows, and historical antecedents to current events.
You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, or email me at barkerc65[at]gmail.com. Thanks for tuning in.
It is worth acknowledging that this deal was announced just a few days before the Wall Street Journal reported on a civil suit filed against WWE founder Vince McMahon for alleged sex trafficking (among many, many other horrifying accusations). McMahon, for all his business acumen, is by all accounts a deeply evil man. The proximity of the WSJ story to the Netflix agreement and a related announcement that The Rock is joining TKO’s board is almost certainly not a coincidence.
Even for an industry known for false and sweaty celebrations of its popularity, this designation is a mouthful. Look, the show has been on for 31 years and it runs new episodes every week.