Fifteen years ago, the world of streaming used to be a simple place. You could pay $9.99 a month to Netflix or Hulu and open the door to a vast array of primarily archival content. At the time, this was a veritable Library of Alexandria of licensed content in which the original rights holders had lost interest, given that scheduled television programming and theatrical screenings were still the way that most people consumed content. Then, new programming such as Netflix’s Kevin Spacey-fronted House of Cards, exclusive to the streaming services, began to appear. Much of the old licensed content, such as reruns of Frasier, disappeared — reverting back to the original rights-holders, many of which were now launching their own streaming sites, each of which charged upwards of $9.99 a month for access.
For us fans of sports, a source of seemingly infinite content, who could once plan much of our viewing across the broadcast networks, ESPN, and a regional sports broadcaster or two, the story of this period is far worse. Want to watch a niche sport such as amateur wrestling, for example? Good luck. That’s spread across ESPN+, FloSports, Fite TV, and UFC Fight Pass and will run you upwards of $50 a month if you want to access all of it. How about the NFL? You’d need CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, and the NFL Network to access all of that programming. That’s three broadcast networks, a cable network, two streaming services, and a premium cable channel, if you’re keeping up.
But now that WWE has announced it cut a deal with Netflix to move its flagship Raw show to the streaming service for $5 billion over 10 years, it is with pro wrestling that this confusion — “the divarication of content,” one academic called it — hits closest to home. You see, once upon a time, I was a wee lad who watched WCW Saturday Night on TBS and WWF Superstars of Wrestling on whatever local network carried it on Saturday morning. Occasionally, my father would pony up for a pay-per-view or buy me a VHS tape of the event after it happened. Both Saturday Night and Superstars of Wrestling drew surprisingly robust ratings in the late 1980s, numbers that modern-day shows such as WWE Smackdown and AEW Collision couldn’t even touch if you combined all their viewers for an entire month. Wrestling was marginal, in the sense that it wasn’t covered in the New York Times or by the nightly news in the absence of some unsavory scandal, but it was also ubiquitous. It had a large albeit silent audience of redneck and white-trash viewers for whom it constituted a shared cultural experience, back when such a common bond was truly possible. In those days, even if I had nothing else to discuss with my peers, I could fall back on pro wrestling.
This shift, from a locally adored sport with staggering local ratings in the 1970s and a far larger workforce of locally-based wrestlers to an internationally valuable asset in the streaming wars, reflects a significant change in how we consume media. The local markets that once embraced wrestling as a communal event now encounter it as part of an expansive, often bewildering digital landscape in which they represent tiny nodes on a vast subscriber map. The WWE’s huge rights deal with Netflix is one of several it has recently made. Smackdown, currently airing on Fox, will move in October 2024 to the USA Network, owned by NBCUniversal, which also owns the rights to stream, via its Peacock service, all of the wrestling juggernaut’s historical content and premium live events, such as Wrestlemania and the recent Royal Rumble, formerly “pay-per-view” events back when you bought them separately. NXT, the third WWE wrestling show highlighting younger and emerging talent, is currently airing on USA but will move to the CW in October. And if that isn’t confusing enough, Raw, which airs on USA, will move to Netflix in 2025.
Granted, the WWE’s shows have jumped from network to network throughout their existence, including stints on Spike TV, SyFy, the UPN, NBC, the MSG Network, and more. But 2024, at least in theory, was supposed to be a time of media consolidation. However, the only thing that has been consolidated is the WWE itself, merged into the same umbrella entity, TKO Group Holdings, that also operates the UFC. Unsurprisingly, UFC’s content is hopelessly split, too. Much of it is on its own Fight Pass, but all of its new content, including pay-per-views that can be bought in-app, is on ESPN+. It’s 2024, my mother frequently bemoans, and you can’t even get all the Shrek films and their spinoffs on one streaming service.
And it’s only going to get worse. A company like TKO Group Holdings or a professional sports league like the NBA only needs to deliver value to the people who own it. They would stream their events exclusively in Palau if it paid a few billion more than doing so domestically would (the app-addicted sports gamblers who subsidize this vast live sports enterprise would find ways to watch, don’t worry). The NBA has already stated that it’s looking to double the $24 billion windfall it got from Disney (parent company of ESPN) and Warner Brothers Discovery (TNT Sports) during their last negotiation cycle. This could mean hacking up their countless hours of hooping and balling into ever-tinier increments. Maybe ESPN+ gets some games. Maybe Amazon Prime gets the All-Star Game. Maybe Hulu gets the Slam Dunk Contest. Maybe Paramount gets the Three-Point Contest. Maybe Peacock gets a few summer league showcases. And on down the line until you need to fork over three figures a month just to watch less than your already overpriced cable bill entitled you to a decade ago.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
This shift in media consumption patterns has been forced upon us by media conglomerates and the sports grandees with whom they transact business, not by any rational decisions of ours. Given my druthers, I’d prefer to watch all my favorite sports on ad-free YouTube Premium, the way I view sumo wrestling and perhaps the best bargain of any of the streamings I maintain for work. More to the point, the ongoing shift has profound and largely negative implications for how we experience cultural content, including sports like pro wrestling that could once serve as a great unifier in a community like Charlotte or Portland.
The communal aspect, a defining feature of wrestling’s earlier days, is diluted almost to nothing in an age of excessive streaming complexity, where viewing is not so much individualized as completely atomized. Whether we opt out and cease watching or put on our thinking caps and track down as much of this content as we can, the result is the same — we are all alone together, each of us pondering what’s left of the common things we held so dear.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.