Will Wrestling Continue to Benefit from Online Streaming?

The biggest forms of entertainment are all making their gradual shift to a primarily online base, particularly over the past year as many have had little choice but to over digital alternatives as offline events remain difficult – there’s also the growing support from other markets such as betting as these available not on gamestop continue to drive digital options forward too. With a major shift in other forms of entertainment heading online too, many are laying down the blueprints for success, and with the WWE Network undergoing a rebuild a couple of years ago but still perhaps not performing as great as many would have hoped – can wrestling continue to benefit from its own online streaming platform, or is something a little different needed?

Wrestling, in a similar way to other combat sports like the UFC, have all been suffering from the same issue as their big reliance on PPV events has led to certain expectations online as those paying for the event pay for the online experience too, but both have had issues with their streaming services in the past – the UFC with its partnership with EPSN and wrestling with its own WWE Network as the quality didn’t quite live up to standards, buffering issues, or even just not working at all – it is what had led to huge numbers of fans turning to pirate stream alternatives. Part of the issue is within scalability, it’s hard to build for a certain audience size and then to adjust later on purely for the big events, but something clearly needs to be done in order to continuing delivery of the content in the best possible way.

There is certainly motivation for getting it right – recently Disney announced that they’ve managed to secure 100 million subscribers in just 16 months, something that took their competitor of Netflix over 10 years to do and have now shifted their goalposts to hope for 260 million by 2024 – a good service in itself is enough to get people on board, and the blueprint is already there to do so. If the WWE can follow suit and make a service that’s able to deliver on all of the fans wants and requirements, at a decent price point, it can help to elevate the sport, but with the current service not meeting higher expectations for some, and a host of problems for many different users, it may not be finding the full benefit it could. Particularly after such a recent revamp of the system there may be reluctance to try again, but streaming is at an all time high, and may certainly be worth it.