WWE and AEW media rights renewal mania

If someone you love is struggling with their mental health, you don't have to struggle alone. Call or text 988 to get resources and support from trained crisis counselors who can help you help them. 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Hope has a new number. Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Russell Onyx Radio. I'm Brandon Thorson Broadcasting, live and on demand for Buffalo, New York. It is 47 degrees Fahrenheit. Joining me to my immediate south is Chris Colo, who has survived the Twitter apocalypse. Yeah, you know. That's some paying per month helps. To my far east, Jesse Collings, who also, like me, never had a blue check mark to begin with. Hello. Yeah, just when I thought I'd come close to getting a blue check mark. Now it's lost all relevancy. It's like a... You work for a major media publication though. Yeah, I, you know, they did a thing probably about a year ago now where they told us if you want to get certified on Twitter, like send in an application and like my company was going to submit like en masse a huge request for verification. And I told us it was going to take like months and months for them to figure it out. And I guess they never figured it out because I think Twitter was bought after that. And the verification system changed. But my plans to be verified and my plan... I'm sure when you're verified and I'm sure Gullow can confirm this is that when you get that little blue check mark, people just take you a lot more seriously. Instantly, you get a million followers like really quickly. Everyone just agrees with you all the time. I'm sure it's just pure bliss and I can only dream of such a thing. I guess I can now attain that dream for $8, correct? Yeah, I like longer tweets. That's my favorite thing about it. Do you make longer tweets? Yeah, sometimes I'm promoting things, you know what I mean? There's just not enough words. Here's the thing we have to talk about. So, Chris Gullow, you did not have a blue check mark until very recently. Very much in the Elon Musk era. Did you acquire this blue check mark? And I may or may not have a Chrome extension that tells me who's paid for the blue check mark and who authentically is famous and important. May or may not be famous and important. So I have some evidence to support the notion that you in fact, Chris Gullow, did pay and our pay, you still have it, are paying for a blue icon next to your name. Is this true? It is when it was first available to buy. I got it. Why? Why? I don't know. I just, I, because I was, I've been trying to get it for a couple of years and I did. They just kept kind of give me the run around. Twitter did. And when I saw people with a lot less followers to me get it. And like, like guys that worked at like local bands and Buffalo were getting blue check marks with 300 followers and I couldn't get it like, I was like, what is going on here? And they don't like, they're not working for a, a newspaper, a local TV network or something. No, it was just, yeah, it was just random check marks. So I, this is, this is surely to protect you also from the like millions of, of Chris Gullow parity accounts that are also there. There is one. There is one? Well, there's kind of one. So, yeah, somebody. What's the hand? Do you want to promote it? No, somebody, who's name is not Chris Gullow has that Chris Gullow is their handle. It's like Chris, it's like Chris Gullow one. So think, I'm just Chris Gullow, at least somebody named Stephanie Camp. I have no idea who she is or whatever, but she uses Chris Gullow's handle. So anyways. Well, as people, uh, can tell from our social media plugs that are on the bottom, underneath our names on the screen, we were all very proactive in getting our names on Twitter. We, we have occupied the full first name, last name, no space, no problem. But yeah, so I paid for a blue check and I'm kind of mad about the $8 a month thing because I have Andrew and I get charged 11. I get charged 11. Because you, you paid through the Google store or something. So, um, so you're paying $11 a month to. I will most likely be getting rid of it after this, after this per. You've been shamed now. Yeah, I've already charged me for the month before this happened. So I've been meaning to bring this up for a while now. So you've been charged more than once, I think. Like two or three months, yeah. Yeah. Um, it appears that some, that most people who have over a million followers have been given it for free now. Okay. So that's happening. I was surprised. Well, I may or may not have happened. And, um, there's no way to verify whether or not the ratings that you're seeing are really me reporting the ratings, I suppose. This did happen on a Thursday, which is the day that the E.W. Dynamite ratings come out after Wednesday. Um, wouldn't have been surprising to see somebody, uh, post a fake Wrestle Linux ratings tweet. Don't do that if you're listening, but. Well, you just gave a bunch of people the idea Brandon. Well, this is why I need my authenticity verified perhaps, uh, in the interests of, um, of the general public. Uh, but anyway, um, we're going to talk about some things today. It is, we are well, we are well into the right of first refusal window for at least WWE's incumbent media partners, NBC Universal and Fox corporation that, that of the quarter, three quarters of a million dollar settlement fame. Um, and, uh, we will talk about AEW's situation as well. Of course, if you want to participate with a question or a comment and have us read it and answer or react to it, you can participate with a super chat if you're listening live on YouTube. Um, but, uh, where shall we begin? This, this week on the Sports Illustrated Media with Jimmy Trainup podcast, he had on, what's his name? Jim Miller? Uh, he had on, I think it's Jim Miller, right? Jim Andrew Miller. Jim, yeah, he has three names. James Andrew Miller, uh, who said that there are people at Warner Brothers Discovery that are interested in WWE. He knows it. He stated it as a fact, not something he was speculating about that maybe they would be interested or maybe it makes sense for them to be interested if, if NBA goes, he said it as a fact. WWE, WWE is going to take away. He can say like this. Okay. But, WWE is going to take away AEW's business partner. Of course, news aggregators of wrestling information far and wide, absorb this news and made ad revenue off of it perhaps. Um, but we have a, do I have my notes out here? But we have a report from Fightful that came out yesterday that says what? Uh, Jim Miller caused some speculation suggesting that WBD was interested in W content, especially if they lose the NBA, but Fightful, uh, has received information saying that several W executives have not heard anything to suggest that there have been any conversations between WWE and WBD while there have been conversations with other potential partners. There have been no discussions between WBD and WBD conversely sources at WBD have indicated they are actually looking into expanding their relationship with all a wrestling financially and in terms of content. There were no negative comments made about WBD in these conversations, but it was suggested that the expansion will become evidence soon, uh, collision may be coming soon, maybe other content. So there's that. I think that's just throw some cold water on that. I'm apt to believe, uh, there's some good credibility to the Fightful report considering these are WWE sources who would be interested, it would be to their interest to say, oh, yeah, WBD is, Bd is interested in us. Lots of people are interested in us. More bidders. Or, or even to just say like, or even to just say like ambiguous. Yeah, we definitely be interested in talking to one of our brothers discovery. Yeah. To even not even, you wouldn't even have to go as far as to say, yeah, we're totally talking to them. But at least give some level of interest, some mutual interest. And, um, I listened to the, the podcast and, um, James Miller, I, I'm not super familiar with this work. I know he's an investigative journalist and I did his books about CAA. Okay. I've read, I've read his ESPN book, um, which is very good. He does like, he has a very thorough oral history of ESPN. The book probably came out about 10 to 15 years ago. Um, he's written a whole book on CAA. Uh, so the, the, um, the agency that Nikon has come from. Yes. Uh, I don't know what his grasp is on the pro wrestling, uh, industry is. Um, and I think that's true for a lot of the people that maybe appear on these major sports media rights podcasts. Um, considering he wrote a book about CAA, I would think probably not too hard for him to get information that, that may fall out of Nikon's world. Right. Which, which makes the WWE sources that Fightful has saying that, no, we haven't really talked to WBD more interesting because if he's getting that fed from like a Nikon led world, surely the Fightful report would also probably have at least someone saying a similar thing. Um, he doesn't really, if you, you listen to the podcast, he doesn't really all the elaborate on like why he thinks, uh, WBD has interest in WWE. He, he just says, this is a wider conversation about sports media and T rights. He says that. He says that. Right. He says, he kind of just says that people he talked to were opposed to discovery would have an interest in WWE, which maybe in like the most basic sense, like, yeah, we would be interested in having WWE if WWE wanted to be on one of those discovery, but not if it that there's a far cry from, you know, bidding competitively for WWE with these other people that we think are going to be involved, like NBCU. Um, he also, uh, says that, uh, he also says that there's 80,000 people at WrestleMania, which we know wasn't really true, but it's in the press release. W's on the record. Okay. Well, that's why WWE does the press releases. And that's why they lie about the numbers because people like, uh, Jim Miller here will, we'll go on a major podcast and say, yeah, they had 80,000 people there, um, which in some ways makes me question the diligence that's going into his reporting or commenting on WWE in the first place. If he's you're saying to be lying about how many people are in the building. Yes. They're counting the staff and the security and the ushers and the ticket takers and the things of that nature and the people who work in parking and the police outside and the people and don't forget the people in the suites and the empty seats in the suites. All those may be counted. The, uh, the talent in the staff. Yeah. He also says something pretty interesting, which is that he says that it's possible that Monday Night Rock could be moved off of Monday nights. That sounds crazy to me. Um, yeah. He uses the evidence saying that Nick Khan was able to give his WWE to move pay per views off of Sunday onto Saturday nights. Um, which I don't know how much longer that's going to happen because I believe the rationale behind, um, the move to Saturday nights was this idea that you have see paper views are on Saturday nights, big boxing paper views are on Saturday nights. WWE needs to be in that world. So our paper views are going to be on Saturday nights too. But with the merger coming between endeavor and WWE, wouldn't it seem likely that WWE wouldn't want WWE's paper views competing with UFC content, whether it's a UFC paper view or UFC flight event. You, WWE and UFC are emerging and UFC often runs on Saturdays. So it, it could be the case that we see more w pay per views, PLE's excuse me on Sundays again. It could be. I don't know. Because they would just stand for a reason. They wouldn't want to compete with any form of UFC. Um, have they ran again? Um, you have seen a lot though on Saturdays? I'm sure they've run against UFC has an event pretty much most Saturday nights. Now they don't always have a major paper. The smaller version. Yeah, but even then if you're, if you're, if you're in devor and you're getting paid by, you know, ESPN or whatever for your fight night events, why would you also run competing content and you certainly wouldn't run competing content if we're talking about, uh, um, a right steel that maybe is combined between UFC content and, and WWE content like we talked about with a streaming partner as something that could potentially arise. So I'd, I'd be, I'd question that. But the idea of raw moving from Monday night, which Miller uses the logic of, well, Monday nights, a tough night for television. You've got Monday night football. You've got the college football national championship game, you know, which is of course only one night a year, but that also is on Monday night week, September. Yeah. Um, it's the first week of January. Um, that's true. They also go against, they also go against college football. I'm like the first, the last week before Monday football starts, they always go against college football on that day once a year. Um, but I'm sure, you know, it's interesting because I'm sure WWE hasn't, it's not like Monday night football is a new thing. It was on the air well before Monday night raw. So the idea that Monday night is that our competitive television night is not new. Oh, they could do better. I said we do. But right. But would you, I don't think that tradition is would be pretty big. I would think. All right. And also like raw is really Monday night raw, it really is an institution. And would the benefit of moving to a Tuesday night or moving to a Wednesday night, um, would like that ought to be the change from that institution day to a different random day of the week, um, would that really be worth it? Would you do better on a Wednesday night or a Tuesday night? I think the answer is if, if like anything, it's for the right price, maybe and we're open to everybody's open to the conversation about, about will you have us on your network and how much would you pay for that? But a network would want to theoretically like, yeah, and he talks about this in relation to Warner Brothers discovery purchasing. But it's not like what is on TNT or TBS on Monday nights? It's not like basketball is on TNT on Monday, right? That's it's on Tuesday and Thursday on TNT. So why is Monday, why would Monday even be a problem? Theoretic or TNT because the competition on Monday night, sure, right? Which is, and that's why I didn't really buy it. So, but why would TNT and TBS, if we accept those as being the most likely networks to host one of that raw, I guess you could move it to true TV or something somewhere else. But if it's on TNT or TBS, what night of the week are they going to put on? Because if they buy raw and they don't want to put it on Monday night, are they going to put it on Tuesday and they're not going to put it on Tuesday and Thursday because they have the NBA, right? They get, they maybe they replaced dynamite with Wednesday night. I think if Vince is resistant to moving one at night at all, I think you'd be extra resistant to moving to our replacement of dynamite's time slot on 8 p.m. on Wednesday nights. And I think it's a question of what if there were actual discussions about this? And first of all, I wouldn't be that skeptical of the idea of WBBB exploring it. Just like I'm not that skeptical of many possible suitors exploring the idea of buying or doing some sort of company transaction with with WWE, it doesn't cost that much to investigate it and explore that interest. Making it actually happen is a totally different thing versus exploring it or even bidding on it. So if this was something that realistic it was going to happen, which I don't really buy, especially in light of this Fightful report, it would be a situation where WV would I would think would say, well, what would make the deal interesting to us is if we had exclusivity, we don't want to be on a network that has our competitor that we even public never admitted is our competitor. We got the lineers on by the way. And maybe that would make it worth it. And I just, that's a huge hurdle. Why would I don't believe that A.W. is going to let go of A.W. anytime soon? I think maybe they would be open to the idea of having both, but I don't think they're going to drop one for the other. I think so. Right. Being a little proactive in case somebody outbids them for A.W. Like maybe they're interested just by that. You know, it could be, but it seems, seems pretty remote. I think it also seems, it also seems against the tide of, and they kind of admitted this on the podcast. It seems against the tide of everything we're hearing about one of our other discovery, which is that they've really trying to cut back and they're really trying to figure out what kind of content they're willing to pay for and the idea of them spending. Well, we should, we should mention too, this was sort of mentioned in the context of maybe they lose NBA. And in that case, Tuesday and Thursday is open. Right. And a lot of money is open. So there's that. Anything else to add there? No, that's it. So more news. Here we are. It's the United Center. This report coming from the observer, I've got a summary of it from John Powell, post wrestling. The pending return of CM Punk appears to have a location. They've known for the rest of the rest of the news. There are reports that AEW has booked the United Center in Chicago for Saturday, June 17th, which is expected to feature Punk's return. Um, they, I guess that's, that's the, the main part of it. Should I read the rest of this? Dave wrote as things stand out, the return of CM Punk is scheduled for June 17th, June 17th showing United Center in Chicago, which being a Saturday show is likely the debut of the new weekly show. The rumor of the new show name is AEW collision based on a trademark. The company took out some time back when the talks with WBD for the new Saturday show got serious at press time. Everything was not finalized, but the building is booked and it likely will be announced very shortly when the Punk deal and the TV deal are finalized. Obviously the building deal and with the building deal in place, the TV deal either has to either be done or they must be almost certain of it. The decision on Punk returning was made many weeks ago, although there was a snag two weeks ago that Dave Merriman, I've been somewhat tangentially involved in back that that was evidently, that has evidently been worked out. Andrew Zarian of the Matt Men podcast reported a June return for Punk in conjunction with the start of AEW yet to be announced at Saturday show, which is expected to be called collision. Punk has been off AEW programming since September, since all out in the backstage flight happened. The United Center house Punk's debut in August 2021, the debut of Rampage, where they did 14,000 paid and a gate of $658,000. This sounds not obviously not confirmed by AEW, but virtually certain that there's going to be a new show debuting on June 17th, one year to the date when Binsic Man came on, a smackdown and said, well, I'll come smackdown. And CM Punk's going to be there. Maybe it's a soft roster split, but sounds like this is somewhat at the insistence of the network too that they want CM Punk back on their television because he proved to be pretty significant ratings draw. So any thoughts on that? I mean, I really don't want to get too into the weeds and our potential roster split and things like that because we don't really know if any of that's actually going to happen. But the idea that the network is insistent on CM Punk returning or equally is willing to give Tony a lot of money for a new show built around CM Punk in some capacity or the relationship between the network wanting CM Punk to come back does make help rationalize the backstage reports and rumors that we hear about whether or not CM Punk is going to come back, whether or not he can come back without really smoothing things over with the elite, whether CM Punk can come back and still maybe some be unpopular backstage. All of the reasons why CM Punk would be able to do all that would be because he is very, very valuable to AW and very, very valuable to potentially millions of dollars of extra revenue coming in from a new television show. And that does help explain a lot of those things. I'm searching to see if we have a poll star number for this United Center show from last year two years ago actually, but we don't. It doesn't look like- And this does- I'm really interested in seeing if this does come to fruition. Just what kind of schedule we're talking about here during that period of the year for AW because they're going to be launching this new show Collision on Saturday in Chicago at the United Center. They're basically going to try to do the first dance again. Does it still allow? I have no idea. I think so. I think so. Yeah. I think it's certainly not that Rampage Show in August 2021 that sold out based on a rumor, an unconfirmed rumor that Punk would be there, which he was there. That was his debut. But I think that there's- Yes, this has become a big wrestling media story. I don't know what that means in terms of consumption of tickets in the Chicago area. It is his hometown. If there is a town, if there's a market where he's going to be a strong draw, it's going to be here in Chicago. But 14,000 paid like it was last time. Not avidly. They're not going to eat him up, I don't think. Yeah. I mean, and has he in Punk damaged his drawing ability and his popularity with some of the fans due to his actions? That's something that I would keep in mind. I definitely think like the show would be a successful show in the sense I think we'll do a pretty strong rating. I think there'll be a lot of discussion and hype for it. But whether or not it's definitely- The magic isn't going to be there. Like the magic of the show last year where the show just opens up and Sam Punk comes out for the first time and gets that gigantic reaction and fans are crying and things like that. That magic, that can only be done once. It cannot be replicated. And I would be, I wonder if we're going to watch this happen and it's going to be like this weird dollar store version of that rampage from last year. It's very interesting. So they're running that show at the Unite Center on that Saturday. They're running a smaller venue in Chicago on Wednesday, the WinTrust Arena, that following Wednesday. And then next, the Sunday after that, a few days after that Dynamite, they have for Bendorf Toronto. So are they going to run another Taping of Collision the day before? It raises a lot of questions. Are you sure? Yeah, it's for this. Right now they do Dynamite every Wednesday. And usually they're taping Rampage after the Dynamite Taping. It raises the question about a lot of things. Is there going to be a second weekly arena taping for AEW? If that's the case, that's raising AEW's expenses quite a bit. Secondly, is this something that AEW is going to receive an immediate raise in media rights from WBD because of? I don't believe for a second that they got a significant raise when they started doing Rampage. Rampage, a third hour of in-ring content was part of their original agreement made in January 2020. I don't believe they got a huge raise, if anything, for doing Battle of Elts an extra hour of content four times a year. But this is if they have to do a second touring date per week, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses easily. So do you think it's possible that Collision is not a weekly show? Could it be something like biweekly or once a month? If there's reports and there's people who believe this is going to be a soft roster split, that sounds like people on different tours to me. Otherwise, everybody's in the same locker room, everybody's going to the same venue. If you want to keep these parties away from each other who don't like each other and don't want to work with each other, you'd probably not bringing them to the same tapes. It could be that, but that's not what it sounds like according to these reports. We're going to find out really soon and we should also end up seeing subsequent touring dates. We know they have that it's in Regina. Saskatchewan is another presumed taping. That was thought of the first one before this rumor of the United Center popped up. Do you think that... I think we all know that CM Punk is a big star. That's a July 8th date, just a place that's a few weeks after the Summer, the June 7th date in Chicago. It's not to say there couldn't be dates in between, obviously, but that, yeah. Right. Well, I'm just thinking with Forbidden Door the Sunday before they're going to have to do a taping probably live the night before. Where's that going to be? Is that going to be at the Scotia Bank Arena where they're taping Forbidden Door? That would make the most sense, right? There are going to be another... Another Scotia bank show the day before. With collision. I mean, that bet you sold out so it might not hurt. Yeah, you'll get people in town and if you do something like a big CM Punk announcement or something like that. But I was going to ask CM Punk is a big star, certainly, and he's certainly the kind of wrestler that on the paper you would want to kind of build a show around if you were to pick someone on the A.W. roster that has to anchor their own show. You'd probably pick CM Punk based on drawing ability. Are you concerned at all about CM Punk's ability to stay healthy? Yes. Because I would be very afraid of building... Oh, okay, this is going to be the CM Punk show for a guy that has had two very significant injuries. And the second injury came in the second match after his return to injury. After he had his first real match. Right. His first match that was more than four minutes in length. And so, was that just a fluke stuff? Was that fluke thing? Certainly his original injury where he hurt his leg jumping into the crowd, you could argue, is very much a fluke injury. But he's over 40 years old. How old is he? 44-45 at this point. So he's... Or old. He didn't wrestle for 10 years, which probably helped him physically to a degree, although he did do some MMA fighting. He's 44. He'll be 45 in October. His... I'd be... That's a... I mean, regardless of the new show or not, CM Punk's ability to stay healthy and his ability to wrestle on a consistent basis has to be a question mark. And that's something else that he can't work out. It's to be fair, he did wrestle a lot before he got the foot injury. His first year in AEW, you would say, he held up very well. He wrestled on a pretty regularly basis. It wasn't like he only wrestled like four matches. He was wrestling pretty regularly on television. So if you could get him back on that schedule for collision, that would be fine. But I would be worried about putting all of my eggs on the Saturday show on CM Punk, being the big star to kind of anchor the show. And then Dynamite can be the more typical AEW show with the elite and other talent. And being so heavily reliant on that one individual star, when that one individual star is getting up there in age and has suffered some serious injuries and has missed a considerable amount of time since he was first signed with the company. In addition to the fact that the guy's a loose cannon that might just walk out of the company at any minute, that's something that has to be a real concern. I hope Tony is ready to take that risk if he is in fact going to build a lucrative new Saturday night show all around him. I don't want to piggyback on that. With the Saturday night thing, I want to kind of talk about ratings. Of Saturday night, whether it's at six o'clock, eight o'clock, wherever it's going to be, I mean, it's not a great place to be because Saturday night people are usually out or they're at live sporting events where it might be. And in prime time, there's basically no other choice. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's no other choice. So like, can CM Punk carry this to have similar ratings to Dynamite? And, you know, what does this also say about Rampage? Why not try to get Rampage maybe to earlier slot in TBS instead of TNT and do that as your second brand instead of create a whole third show here? So we did see the trademark as mentioned in the report that we just read. There was a trademark filed, believe in February about this, we got the Times New Roman Mark AEW collision, which I have verified is spelled with two eyes in it. I've made that error earlier this week. But so just look to look at the ratings. And I want to think about the Times slot and the rating that this show might be capable of. This we were seeing on the screen for people watching a video is the entire monthly average history of Dynamite and Rampage ratings in total viewership. So if you look at this, this is the entire history going back to October 2019 when Dynamite debuted. And looking at the entire history of Dynamite is fairly stable and obviously they've had a lot of external effects in terms of NXT going ahead to head with it for the first year and several year, about a year and a half. And then when NXT went away, AEW of course did better. CM Punk came along and others came along. It did even a little bit better. But of course Rampage started out with a massive average of over 800,000 viewers for the first half month of August and has fallen down from there. It is doing better so far in April than it was in two prior months, but it's averaging around 500,000 now some of that. I think I might actually still be excluding the, so I'm probably only looking at maybe one or two episodes of Rampage here. Anyway, I think I'm excluding that big episode that they did this past Friday, not this past Friday, but two Fridays ago when they had a massive NBA play in-game lead-in. But anyway, Rampage is struggling to do 500,000 viewers, sometimes struggling to do 400,000 viewers. That's on Friday, not a great weekday. It's at 10 o'clock, not a great time. We're talking about a Saturday show that I'm sure will be treated as very special at first. At what time on Saturday is a big question. Are we talking about 6.05 or 6 o'clock PM Eastern, like the old Saturday night WCW show, and even before that Georgia Champions Wrestling show was on TBS. I expect this is going to be on TBS or TNT, one of the two. I don't think this is a true TV show. Is 8 o'clock better? I don't know if 8 o'clock is better because if 8 o'clock, if you do 8 o'clock, you're going against WBPLEs at times, at least once a month or something. So maybe 6 o'clock is safer or 7 o'clock is a better time slot because you won't have to worry about that competition once a month. And I haven't looked at ratings on a grander scale to say, is 6 or 7 better than 8 on a Saturday? I wouldn't be surprised if it's not that different. That's true on Sunday. When it comes to sports on Sunday, that Sunday afternoon is just as good as Sunday prime time for live sports in a lot of cases. In some cases, even better. So it wouldn't surprise me if that's a time. And people are maybe more likely to be around Saturday at 6 p.m. than they are at Saturday at 8 p.m. Certainly in the key demo, I would suggest that it might be the case. I guess my question is, a couple months into this, three months into this, is this show doing better than Rampage is doing on Friday at 10? I don't think it's going to do as well as Dynamite. And second to that, is this going to be a one hour show? I don't think it would be a two hour show. But if you're doing another taping, I don't know. It's at least a one hour show. Is adding another hour of primaries. This is not an hour of dark elevation. This is another hour of CM Punk content. Is this going to have a negative impact on Dynamite and or Rampage because of the addition of content here? I mean, historically, if you look at things like what was RAW rating before SmackDown started or what was WCW Nitro doing before Thunder was added, it would suggest that more content and adding a B show can hurt the people's willingness to watch the A show. What did our friend Eric Bischoff say? What really caused a lot of problems from the beginning of that Thunder show? Sure. And yeah, and I would say that's probably the only reason you could say that WCW struggled correct. Just the addition of Thunder was really popped the balloon there. I mean, a number of amazing downloads there. So Paul Cogan, the biggest draw in the history of wrestling, Eric Bischoff, creative genius promoter, he certainly couldn't have been put at fault for that. So you would suggest that. I mean, if it's a roster split and it's appealing to different people, if it's going to be CM Punk and FTR and it's going to be the good old boy, two hours of television and Dynamite is going to be the elite and the flippy to you guys, two hours of television. Maybe you appealed to completely separate audiences. But I think as for me, selfishly as a viewer, I'm not necessarily clamoring for more AEW content. I think I have enough to watch each week and more of the content rides the potential of making me think, I just don't want to watch any of it because I can't keep up with all of it. And I do think that's somewhat of a real feeling. I do think some fans will just watch what they want to watch and not watch what they don't want to watch. But the idea of being, I have to watch all of this stuff. Ooh, that's too complicated. I'm going to stop watching altogether. Is a psychology thing that might take place for some viewers? I did. I'm going to talk about and have the suspicion that the addition of Rampage would have an attrition effect on Dynamite. We certainly like to the naked eye here. We don't see that here. Dynamite, since the beginning of Rampage is fairly stable, I would say. And the moderate decline we've seen in Rampage ratings of late, I would say the biggest thing is the lack of CM Punk rather than the addition of Rampage and the fall of Rampage as feeling like prime content that you can't miss. Right. And that's kind of there's some irony in play here in the sense that if your Rampage is pretty easy to hand wave if you're an AEW fan. Yeah. So it's almost in some ways doesn't feel like it's overwhelming amount of content. It just feels like supplemental content the same way that AEW Dark does. As opposed to if we're going to put a real concerted effort into making AEW collision on Saturday nights, an A show or one A show, then that might end up playing a bigger role. I think the fact that Rampage is kind of declined in its importance to most viewers has made it less that that effect less impactful when it comes to perhaps skewing a AEW or a Dynamite viewership lower. Right. Because Rampage is you can skip it because it's not that important. It's on at this time slot that might be difficult to watch live at. And nothing really happens on Rampage that you have to watch to understand what's going on in AEW. Presumably that's going to be very different with Collision, especially if CM Punk is there. If we assume that Collision is a one hour show, this would put the total hours of what I might call core content, the main content at four with two for Dynamite, one for Rampage, one for Collision. That's still short of even the combination of Ron Smackton, right? Because that's only four hours of weekly content. That's not the five that main roster W is putting out. And then if you add NXT to that, of course you're at seven. But a lot of content. And I think the theme here, and I think what we're learning, and by the way, will probably I would think get this confirmed on, if not on, then around May 17th, which is the day of WBD's up front. That is a day to mark on your calendar. Maybe there at the MSG, is this the Hulu theater still? If he can make it for the WBD up front, this is where I expect. Will you be traveling down in New York City, Brandon, for the WBD up front? If I get enough subscribers, maybe. Not planning on it though. I don't know if I could get access. I don't know if David Zazloff will give me media access or not, but I would look into it. But I would think this is where we're going to have it confirmed. Maybe right on stage there on Wednesday, May 17th. And maybe I wouldn't even be surprised if we maybe get some news that there's some sort of AEW content that's going to be happening on Max. The combined HBO Max in Discovery, which is launching, I guess, or HBO Max is being officially rebranded, beginning on May 23rd, just a few days later. My guess, no information, my guess would be that all in-show in the UK is going to be streamed live on Max as a great way to experiment to see how many users, how much engagement can AEW convert for this streaming service? That's what I would look for. Maybe we learn about that near that date too. So again, if you have a question or comment, feel free to put in a super chat. But I think one of the things we're learning here is when I'm listening to all these media podcasts about the upcoming rights for newals, and the big one on the horizon for the broader media market is the NBA that everybody wants to talk about. It's the number two sports brand in all of media behind the NFL, at least in the US. And they talk a lot about, especially when it comes to baseball, the tonnage, because baseball has, not just 80 games, 162 games, whatever it is per year, just an enormous amount of content. And as much as there may be a cost for fans in the case of wrestling, the big one that everybody's familiar with is Raw going from two hours to three hours, and how much of a burden viewers, at least anecdotally claim that is. And we do see a great deal of tune out from nine o'clock to ten o'clock, often for that show. It's just there's a value in creating more content for this network, because it gives them more content that they can put on their platforms and they can monetize and justify it, add sales and carriage fees, perhaps. And I think what we're going to see now that we're in this time with 4WV, where there's certainly in the first refusal window for Fox and for NBC Universal, I think especially in the AWS case, and true probably too for W is that obviously W and AEW are looking for big increases. But they're not going to just get increases because they're great, because they still do pretty good viewership in an environment where traditional TV viewership is declining. I think these networks are going to make them give them something to get a strong upgrade, which they both probably will get a strong upgrade. But we're going to have to give something back in return for more money. And I think for AEW, that is probably going to mean another show. And I've heard people talk this week about, well, maybe this means the introduction of AWS inclusion, maybe that means that gradually AWS Rampage will go away and that will relieve us from the burden of all this weekly content that we have to watch. I mean, don't count on it. I think AWS Rampage will stick around. And if I'm speculating, yeah, I talked about it on Thursday, there are all of these windows that for AEW, they don't have any, they have nothing on a live streaming service. They have nothing even on a next day streaming service like Hulu. People are always asking, how can I watch Dynamite and Rampage the next day? Especially if I don't have a traditional TV, I'm not recording it on my DVR. You can't. Let's hear it. And that's kind of really unheard of right now in the world of episodic television. Like pretty much any show that's on television, that's on basic cable or premium cable, has people raised this about impact in Japan too. And there's no deal that access has putting those shows on any other streaming service. They mean really double easy, only one of a wrestling company. Right, but you think of every other show on TBS and TNT, I assume that those can be viewed next day on some other platforms. I know it's true for, like I'm trying to think of shows I watch, I know it's true for like Comedy Central shows. What original programming does TNT and TBS have at this point? That's still on. I think the Dizaz love killed them all. He killed a lot of them. I mean, like in practical jokers would be seems to be one that they push, they have those documentaries. Snowpiers are still a show that that TNT airs. I believe Snowpiers is done. You can really go over the final season. I'm trying to think of the episodes, the commercials that I see. They have like the game shows like with the Wayne Wade, the CUBE, is that what's called the CUBE. Yeah, I don't know about it in practical jokers. I know like I know on Comedy Central, which is another WBD property. Vipons. Comedy Central? No, no. That's a Paramount. Is it? Let's see what the internet says. Who owns Comedy Central? Vipon. Paramount. Okay. Well, yeah, I guess I was using that as an example because I know South Park is a show that I watch on streaming like the day after it airs on Comedy Central and that's on Paramount. That's on HBO Max. Okay. South Park has a different deal with Paramount Plus, which is much more complicated than all Stones on Peacock. My point is that pretty much anything that airs on, I feel like, basic cable as episodic television has the next stage. Has an on-demand streaming source. If I want to watch the Vanderpump rules, I wonder, I'm going to look that up now. It's on Peacock. I just saw it earlier today. I believe so. It's on Peacock. There you go. There's another one. There's AEW's now Chief Rifle in addition to the NBA. And that's on Bravo. That's on NBCU. Right. Yeah. So that's self-distributed. Right. So it's very unusual to have not have those next day rights, especially because WWE has set up that. It has been on Hulu for probably a decade now. Long time. Like they've been on Hulu over a really long time. I remember watching episodes of ECW, WWE, on Hulu. That's longer than I can remember watching. You know, NXT before it was cool. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. On Hulu. But I think what we might see is some sort of addition of WWE content, perhaps on Peacock. My latest expectations will probably go opposite of what we did on our prediction show at the end of the year. But my latest expectations that Ron Smackdown will stay with their current incumbents. But who knows? But I do think there's a good chance that we're going to see not necessarily by next month that they're up front, but by the time they renew, presumably at the end of 2024, beginning of 2025, maybe the max. I keep saying the max. Maybe max is the home for next day Dynamite Rampage collision, as we've discussed before. Maybe Rampage goes directly to a livestream on Max and isn't primarily on TNT at all. If you've got another show that's already on. Somebody in the chat, Kat and Coons here has mentioned, I sometimes watch Dynamite and Rampage next day on the TPS or TNT apps themselves. I've done that too. Yeah. There you go. You have to have, if you are a key subscriber. Yeah. Okay. If you're a court cutter or a court never, like I think all three of us, right? Have you ever subscribed to Game? I mean, years ago, yeah. I was using other people's cable log in for a while, but... Were you paying for it? Or were you just being a free loader player? At one point, yes. At one point, but at other points, no. No. Or I'm going to call the police. I have never paid for cable myself. I do have access to cable. But only through, I don't have a typical cable box. I have my parents. I have slang law, actually, so I'm not a court gets to... Does slang are like silo and things like that? Do they allow the next day content? Do they have next day content on there for things like... Sling you can find it on demand. Okay. If I don't DVR Dynamite, I can still search and slang and watch Dynamite. But you don't get the original, as Jason from Pissure and I know, you don't get the original time stands for the original commercials, which screws up your ability to do quarter-hour labels. Because it's like slang, silo, and fubo, because the PlayStation 1 is gone. They were doing that for a while. Well, there's YouTube TV. Yeah, that's where you're at. There's a few other ones I feel like that are out there. It's like kind of like, yeah, it's weird. Like how I watch cable. Like right now, I have a bunch of apps on a Roku device. And they all have my parents' cable login connected to them. So I can kind of...I can basically watch any form of traditional cable television live, but I can't watch it normally. I have to go through different apps. And some of the apps work better than the others. The TBS and TNT app could use a little work. Well, we have now, and according to this chart from insiderintelligence.com, we are now...it's 2023. And we have now entered the era where there are more TV households, households that have a TV, but don't have a traditional pay TV subscription. So that doesn't include...this is only traditional TV subscriptions. Cable and satellite. No sling, no Hulu live, no YouTube, no Fubu. Fubu. I keep saying... Fubu. Fubu. Fubu. Five words. The other one now. The points. There are more non-pay TV households. There are more households without cable than with it. We'll see how that plays out for the profitability of cable TV networks in general and how that plays out and how that trickles downstream to sports TV rights fees. When it comes to thinking, I guess, about whether or not any of these players are going to end up on a streaming service, particularly...the big question I think is around SmackDown, whether or not Fox wants to keep SmackDown. Like I said, I think we might end up in a...I said on Thursday, we might end up with part of what WV could give NBCUniversal is rights to stream maybe select episodes or maybe something, maybe NXT exclusively. By the way, NXT is up this coming September, not next year September, but it's coming September. So there'll probably be announcement about that if not in conjunction with the announcement about Ron SmackDown maybe earlier. But what SmackDown can't give Fox is a place to stream SmackDown. And I know I don't think it's going to to be...it's not happening. Fox has a very different strategy than these others do, right? I think we're familiar with the experience of watching NFL football on Paramount Plus watching CBS right there on the streaming service. We watch football or Premier League live right on Peacock, right on NBC's Peacock. You can watch Fox football on the Fox app. On the Fox app. You can watch football. Yes, I have. Okay. I can watch stuff. Yeah, I can watch live sports on the Fox app on Roku. I believe I need a cable login. Okay, yeah. What's it going to say? Do you have to log in with a cable? Yeah, probably you do, yeah. Okay. Well, you can watch TNT that way too. Live, I think. Correct? Yeah. That's how I watched anime. Right. And I think that's different than I'm a court cutter not contributing to, at least or not using somebody's login who's contributing to the cable subscription fees as opposed to the, I'm paying $5 for Peacock, whatever the cost of Paramount Plus is. And I'm watching the most valuable live sports properties in the system. But Fox is not doing that. Fox is not putting those NFL games on 2B, as far as I know. And to go with these bar graphs for a second, and Brandon, this is something you've talked about a ton, is WWE has benefited from being on Peacock and having their premium live events moved to Peacock because more, that even though that number is significantly lower than some of the larger streaming platforms out there, that 20 million people is still in much broader reach than they would have ever had under the traditional pay per view means. And that is probably more than the peak of WWE network subscribers globally, much less domestically. It's like 20 times the peak of a domestic investment. And that has probably played a role in helping WWE's business go for, not only are more people watching the BLEs, but because they are, they're maybe getting more invested in the product and they're maybe spending more time watching Raw and SmackDown. Maybe they're more likely to buy tickets to a show when they're in town and that kind of thing. I have a question about these bar graphs. HBO Max and Discovery, are you counting traditional HBO cable subscribers? I have to look as part of this. As part of the $5 million. That's kind of two ways you can subscribe to HBO Max, right? You can just have, you can be subscribed to HBO Max. Yes, this is including people who have paid for cable subscription. That includes HBO as part of their traditional cable subscription that also get access to HBO Max. I think the answer is yes. And I'm sure that the Netflix number of 67 million is going to come tumbling down to Earth now that they have finally announced that they are ending their DVD through the mail system. Yes, certainly. It's a tragic day for the few of us who are left using that service. When you combine those HBO Max, Discovery number, how much was the difference between the two? The reason why this is out of order in terms of Netflix is the biggest for people not watching a video. Netflix is the biggest streaming service in terms of subscribers in the United States that there is by pretty significant margin. It's the oldest, the second biggest is Hulu, which is the second oldest. If you take the Discovery subscribers out of this, HBO Max by itself is below Hulu. Probably with its traditional TV subscribers, it's probably above Disney Plus though, which is at 41 million. Okay. Yeah, I was curious how much crossover there is to between Max and Discovery. Can I ask where Amazon Prime and Apple Plus are? Amazon is obviously a unique... Amazon would be above any of these because there's like 80 million subscribers to Amazon Prime in the United States, but how many monthly active users are there? Probably a lot less than 80 million. And I'm like one of the super- And I'm like one of the super- I'm like one of the super- I never watch Amazon Prime. Like I never am just like, let's go see what's on that Amazon Prime. But I will watch it on a very rare occasion if I'm looking for a movie or a TV show and I Google where it's streaming. Oh, do you watch Thursday night football on it during the football season? Yeah, I wouldn't say like I'm a huge Thursday night for both of you. All those big games on Thursday night? The games have been very unappealing. But I have turned it on. I probably turned it on about maybe a half dozen times during last football season. And you mentioned going back to the chart, talking about how like the number of games like MLB has, right? They have 162 games. We have seen MLB cut up and add special games of the week to satisfy streaming servers that want their product. They have created a few years ago, they had contracts with ESPN. They had contracts with Fox and they had contracts with Time Warner. And since then they have a special Apple TV showing of baseball. They have a separate peacock Sunday morning or Sunday at noon time, baseball game. I don't think there's any information about Apple TV subscribers that Apple is publishing. But I would expect it to be the lower than anything on this chart, which the lowest is about 16 million for Paramount Plus. This is my estimate based on their global number that they report. So I mean, when we see the Nielsen chart, Nielsen publishes the gauge donut chart every month and it shows a really small percentage of Apple TV viewership. It's smaller than it's like on the level of a fast service. Yeah, and to be fair, for Paramount Plus, most of my watching Paramount Plus is me watching WBC or local CBS affiliate through the Paramount Plus app. Because like I said, I just have a Roku that has all these things as opposed to getting a broadcast antenna. I just watch sports and I watch Jeopardy, which airs on that network locally. And that's where I watch most of my Paramount Plus. So I'm watching traditional television on Paramount Plus as opposed to on demand streaming. And I wonder how that's factored into viewership. So there's just like one point I want to make here is as we come to this point where according to this chart, again, from the sign of intelligence that we are now at the cross point basically where non T non pay TV homes are greater in number or very close to equal in number versus pay TV homes. So what we have is roughly 70 million, maybe 75 million pay TV homes left in the United States out of something like 110 120 million homes. So if you're on TNT, TBS, that's great. Because you're in virtually all of those homes around USA network. You're in virtually all those homes. If you're on Fox, you're on even a little bit more than that. So you're still missing out on tens of millions of other homes that if you were on, which WPL is are on, you're able to reach a wider portion of the United States population in general. So just to I think that really illustrates why W has benefited to the extent that it has from having those PL is on peacock, even despite peacock being relatively low on this list of where the top streamers in the United States. I mean peacocks is second lowest on this list. It's only got more subscribers than Paramount. It's got less than ESPN plus. But being on once a month on that service, I think has really helped them reach a wider audience or maybe reunite some interest that has contributed along with perhaps better creative to better business for them over the last, even before Vince left couple years. And there's something to the PL is being on that, right? Because we talked about, you know, Ron, Smackdown, or Hulu, why they've got a lot more subscribers than peacock. Does that play a role? Isn't it? Or is that because it's Ron Smackdown, they probably not going to see a kind of viewership for next day, Ron Smackdown's as they are for the special pay per few events. And it's not as urgent programming, right? The PL is are the peak thing. The people are supposed to want to watch the most and it's live for sure. But I think it's an advantage that W has being on Hulu and being on peacock that AEW in no way touches other than the sort of technical ways, yes, you can if you if you have somebody's log in, you can get on the T and T or TBS app and watch dynamite or rampages next day. But certainly it's something live or even to make it easy access for people to watch dynamite or rampages next day, there's no way without going through a lot of friction out of it at a minimum. So if say in 2025, you end up with where's where's my table? If you end up with dynamite, rampage on max the next day or maybe rampage live on max and collision on max the next day, maybe the pay per views after 90 days on max, I think that really helps AEW in an underrated way connect with more fans and leads to a moderate amount of increase engagement in other areas of business. So there's that. What else have we got here? If you're curious, if you're watching YouTube, this is the progression of US subscribers for these major streaming services over time. There's not that much interesting here, I would say. They're all sort of in their own pathways here. It's not as if one has really overtaken another. We keep going here. What else have we got? Yeah, questions to ponder. There was a good article by John Pollack talking about the season that we're in here in terms of media rights fees on post wrestling. You should read it. I've retweeted it if you're looking for a link to it. I don't know if we want to go over, take all the time in the works. We're almost now into this already, but to address some of these questions, if Fox doesn't aggressively bid for SmackDown, does this become a streaming or linear play? And I tend to think that it's probably the best thing for WWE to stay with Fox, to stick, keep with SmackDown on Fox, because I think there continues to be a, it's a great support system for their ability to reach as many people as many fans as possible. And I think going to Amazon, the price has to be enormous if that's the choice. Fox or Amazon, the price really has to be enormous to move away. Would Amazon be interested in a WWE product, a pro wrestling product? Sure, why not? I don't know, we've talked about that with Apple, which obviously has a lot of brand name value, perhaps not be interested in pro wrestling or WWE. Disney Plus, I assume, would not be interested in WWE programming. Highly doubt it, but but ESPN Plus maybe. Yeah, ESPN Plus. So I don't know where Amazon, which has never made any real seeming commitment at all, and then pro wrestling sphere. And also I don't think has like any combat sports broadcasting either. Would they be, is pro wrestling something that the Amazon company is interested in bringing into its portfolio? And much like Apple, they have enormous financial ability to pick and choose what kind of products they want to have. They're not in a position like NBC Universal, where they're really clinging to a few of their major key cornerstone properties to keep things afloat. Someone mentioned in the chat YouTube TV and they did just obtain NFL Sunday ticket, which they're going to run on a subscription service. I wonder if that's possibly something that maybe they look into wrestling as well, if the Sunday ticket is a success for them. I think that's a reasonable player to think about in terms of the Hulu rights that are going to expire in concurrence with the live rights. I think we hear about Amazon being a player for NBA live rights maybe. And with the decline of the RSNs, the regional sports networks, there's probably going to be more games that have national access for the NBA in the next round than ever. Especially if NBC wants a piece and if Amazon wants a piece, this era where you can only get the games through like NBA TV or something like that may be declining somewhat. But I think I like we said with MLB, MLB created additional special national weekly games for Apple TV and for Peacock. There's DeathicStop. The NBA has plenty of games that they could easily slot on to, they could have a Sunday afternoon game on Peacock. They could have a Wednesday night, NBA night on, I guess that's an ESPN night, but they could find different times in the schedule to throw stuff on for all streaming partners. I'm sure they'd be happy for any chat they want to get. I've even heard discussion of like maybe NBA games get distributed somewhat the way that NFL games get distributed in that. If I'm in Buffalo, I'm going to get the Bills game on some network. You in a bigger market may get some bigger market team games with the Jets or the Giants or something like that. But in my smaller market, I'm going to get my team. The Buffalo doesn't have an NBA team for me to draw a comparison with. If you're in Boston, you're in Boston, maybe you're going to get the Celtics game on your local affiliate maybe. Maybe something like that happens if RSN's are not there to make the best use of that. The RSN collapse, we're talking a lot about the Sinclair in Valley sports, Diamond sports. But is that more of an isolated incident or is that the start of a bigger trend? I think that's the start of a bigger trend is the impression I get. I know the Red Sox games are broadcasted locally on a network that is owned by the team in the family sports group. Is that Nesin or is that something else? That's Nesin. Okay. And so I imagine that those aren't going anywhere. Obviously the Yankees are on yes, Yankee network and the Knicks I know in New York or on the West Sea. So some of these are going to be more durable than others. I guess. We'll address one or two more of these. The effect, John Pollock writes in his questions to ponder. The NBA effect on WBD, NBC Universal and other bidders, including the streamers when it comes to spending. Something that light shed analysts, including Brandon Ross, have pointed out is that he's pointing to that comment that Lachlan Murdoch, who's the CEO of Fox made on the Morgan Stanley TMT earnings, not earnings, but Morgan Stanley TMT conference where he says, you know, they're ready to talk to W when they're ready to talk. This is a couple months ago now. And he said, it depends on what our other moves are in sports, something to that effect. And the speculation is that well, maybe they want NBA too. That would put virtually every major media conglomerate, I guess with the exception of Paramount into play here with being interested in NBA rights. And if Fox wants to save money to pay for NBA, which is coming after WWE, maybe that's something that plays into them not bidding as aggressively for SmackDown because we can not we can pass on SmackDown and we can open up Friday and maybe that opens up a slot and opens up money for us to attribute towards NBA games. Not sure if I buy that that that's going to happen, but doesn't mean it's not something that they're considering as an option. Life's better with a home policy from American family insurance because you'll feel protected no matter how the wind blows. Also, you can keep enjoying the home of your dreams. And our expert agents can help you save up to 23% when you bundle home with auto. In short, carefully, dream fearlessly. American family insurance. Get a quote? Find an agent at amfam.com. Products are not available in every state. Visit amfam.com to learn how discounts may apply to you. American family mutual insurance company S.I. and it's operating company 6,000 American Parkway, Madison, Wisconsin. So we have a super chat that's just on media right here. Sure. Some might as well just a big time back. So I asked with cord cutting, do you think it's likely or unlikely, raw will maintain its core audience of over 1.5 million in three to four years since they've been steady since 2020. I think it's more likely that that that T. V. Ryan's continued to decline. I think he'd almost always bank on that. Now live sports, especially if you forget about wrestling, live sports in general have held up better, certainly better than scripted content and have held up better than wrestling. We only have a few years of AEW to look at. We were just looking at the dynamite chart a little while ago and there's some external effects, but Ryan large is kind of flat. Although year over year right now, for sure, they're down several percent. The problem with W. V. is there's the headwind of cord cutting and it's hard for, I don't know if it's hard for me to parse. I think W genuinely had a decline in popularity from 2016 or 17 to 2019. That's independent, obviously of the pandemic. And we saw that somewhat expressed in TV ratings, but also saw it in other consumer metrics that don't have the same kind of headwinds. All that aside, even if W Creative does a great job of sustaining the fans that they have, there's still a really strong headwind to go against, that is, the decline in the number of homes you're able to reach. And I think wrestling is not like other live sports in being as DVR proof and being as great a maintainer of viewers as other sports are because wrestling is somewhat DVRable. As opposed to live sports, very, very, very few people watch basketball, baseball, football on DVR in comparison to the 10, 20, 25 percent of viewership of wrestling that is happening via DVR. All of that I think makes it, makes W as well as AW something that's more prone to be affected by court cutting versus other live sports. I think that there definitely is a role WWE can plug. If we're talking about WWE, there's a role that they can play creatively and helping stem that momentum being lost. I think you're right that this is a strong headwind because you're not only trying to convince people just to watch your show on a regular basis, you're trying to convince them to watch your show and also continue to pay higher cable costs as it becomes less and less fashionable and popular to do so. And less and less stuff outside of wrestling remains on cable for you to want to watch besides, and just, and as we're seeing players like NBC and Paramount kind of cheat and put their best content on streaming, what do I need? What do I need to pay this $80 for a month? You can also do dual cast that you can watch both on television and on streaming. I do think better creative and we've seen that recently can help turn things around if you can get a wrestler like Cody Rhodes over and keep that momentum going that helps. Live attendance post WrestleMania has been really strong so far and the advances on ticket sales for WWE shows remain very strong. We'll see where the ratings settle in as far as what kind of is their post WrestleMania norm. They obviously did some very, very impressive numbers right before WrestleMania and obviously the raw after WrestleMania. We'll see where they kind of settle down into if that's higher or lower than last year. And that will give us some sort of idea because I think most people would consider that the product is better right now and has been better right over the last few months than it was at this time last year. And so we can see and we know live attendance is up. So we'll see if actually being more popular in presenting a better product can make a significant difference in kind of fighting against the cable decline and how successful that is. Okay. Super chats for now, right? So I teased doing something like this a few weeks ago. We didn't get to it. But these parties are not going to be silenced anymore. They're not going to be censored one more week here. We have hot takes coming in from two of the most talked about individuals in all of technology right now. And we have some takes from chat AI bots that want to weigh in on AEW and WWE TV rights deals. So we have have you guys probably have not messed with with the Google Bard chat bot, have you? No, I'm just not from chat GPT. That's all I must say. But you signed up for chat GPT chat GPT is coming later. That's the main event. We have here is the opening act of bard which you sign up for just like chat GPT. You have to like be on waiting list for a minute and then they let you in. So bard I asked what did I ask bard? I told bard to write a few opinion a paragraph on what the outcome of W's US live TV rights renewals will be specifically predict which media partners WWE will sign with what networks raw and smackdown will air on as a result. I've made some clip graph glares here and the average annual value of any new deals. I didn't ask this to chat GPT directly by the way, I want because this has to be something that's connected to the Internet as people may know. That GPT does not know anything that happened after 2021. But bard bard's Google bard's connected to the live Internet and Bing as we'll cool talk with later is also connected to the Internet. So bard says this about W.B. rights renewals. Bard believes that the WWE will sign new media rights deals with multiple partners. I think that the WWE is in a strong position to negotiate favorable deals and I believe the company will receive a significant financial windfall for his new partners. I also believe that the WWE's programming will air on a variety of different platforms. I think that the W.B. will continue to air its programming on traditional cable TV and I also believe that the company will make its programming available on streaming services and sports and sports betting platforms. It's going to air live on on draft Kings or something. I think the average annual value of W's new media rights deals will be significant. It's really not saying anything here. I think that W could earn as much as one billion per year from its new media rights deals. Well, okay, well that's a pretty big upgrade, right? Because they're making 770 right now. So that's more than doubling. That's more than 2x increase. Bard goes on. I'm excited to see what the future holds for the WWE. The world wrestling entertainment. Yeah, that's great. I think the company is in a strong position. I believe that it will continue to be successful for your scrums. These are great trusums here. I think it's been studying transcripts of Nikon interviews or something. So it was pretty inconclusive. I followed up this non-answer with another question here. Name the networks and state your AAV prediction. Bard went on this long, not really coherent response. I'm abbreviating it here. Bard says, here are the networks. I think WWE will sign new media rights deals with. My AAV prediction, AAV stands for average annual value, by the way, for each deal. USA Network. So I guess it's predicting that Raw will stay with USA Network. Between 500 million, so that's an upgrade from 265. So that's almost a 2x. Reasing USA Network has been a successful partner. I think the network will be interested in renewing USA's mail bill. And then it says, the other network is Fox. Presumably Fox would keep smack down at 400, just under 2xing, the 205 that it has now. Fox has been a successful partner, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's what Google thinks. That's what Bard thinks. I basically have a 2x increase. They're very close to a 2x increase. And then have you either of you spoken with the Bing version of chat GPT? You have to use the Microsoft Edge browser to talk to Bing, to talk to the Bing chatbot, which is really inconvenient. But of course, because nobody wants to use this damn Microsoft Edge browser, they make you use the Microsoft Edge browser, which they're always giving you prompts. Like, do you want to make this your default browser, right? No, I don't want to make this my default browser. Golot probably does. Are you still using Edge? No, we are on Chrome. We're living that Chrome world. You were on, I converted you. Yes. Yeah, I was a Firefox guy. You were on Firefox? Yeah. Anyway, Bing has a more coherent response. I told Bing to make a prediction for the outcome of W's US Live Rights Renewals, predict immediate partners, tell me what networks Ron Smackdown are going to air on, tell me the average annual value. Bing says my prediction for the outcome of W's US Live Rights Renewal is as follows. WV will renew its deals with NBCUniversal and Fox for Ron Smackdown, respectively, as both networks have expressed interest in keeping the shows and have the right of first refusal. This is a pretty informative answer, pretty knowledgeable, I would say. WV will also seek a significant increase in value of its TV rights, as its ratings have been resilient and the overall decline of linear TV. WV will also explore a joint streaming deal with UFC, which is part of the same parent company Endeavour. This would allow both brands to leverage their combined fan base and content library, and potentially attract a bigger offer from a streaming platform such as Amazon, Netflix, or Disney Plus, yeah, right. WV's current streaming deal with Peacock expires 2026, but NBCU may try to renew it early. As a result of these negotiations, I expect WV to secure an average annual value of at least $500 million for its US Live Rights, and another $300 for streaming. This would represent a significant increase in its current deals, which are worth $265 and $205 million per year for Smackdown and $200 per year for Peacock. So its statements about what the current deals are worth is accurate. But saying that it's going to get a significant increase, which is going to be $500, which would only be up from $470. That's a pretty bearish response. That's less than a 1.1x increase that being is predicting here. WTKO stock price is not going to like that result if that's the outcome. No, I think the bar A.I. would be much more favorable to W.I.T. The thing has better background knowledge here and sounding like it knows what it's talking about. That's not important. We want to put the part A.I. on CNNBC that we have are doing an interview with to talk about the WWE's rights increase. Bing probably doesn't count the ticket takers when it comes to attendance. I will say George Barrios is talking during the WWE conference calls does make a lot more sense having read this A.I. bot discussion of WWE. Yes. Okay. And then what about AEW? That's what everyone wants to know. For opinion, I told it on what the outcome of AEW's live TV rights renewal will be. Shesically, I want to know which media partners AEW will sign with, what networks AEW programs will therefore air on as a result and the average annual value of any of the deals. Bing says, I think AEW will renew its TV rights deal with Warren Brothers' discovery when it expires 2023 or 2024. The WWE seems very happy with AEW's performance and ratings. It's a commitment by launching a new streaming service called Collision that will feature AEW content. AEW breaking some news here, breaking some news. The Bing AEW bot telling us that Collision is not going to be a satellite show. It's going to be a streaming service featuring AEW content. We'll work to confirm that. AEW will also benefit from staying with WVD as it will have access to large inverse audience across TV, ST&T, and TrueTV as well as four quarterly specials on TNT. I estimate that AEW will get a significant increase in its annual value from the current $45 million to around $70 million based on the growth of its fan base and demand for its product. That's about a 1.5x increase, which is pretty close to being disappointing, I would say, for AEW in terms of what I imagine their budget needs to be. They are not using Dave Meltzer's math to figure out what the possible number is for that new show. Certainly not. I would almost call this the Bing is kind of an AEW doomer when it comes to TV rights here in the future of AEW. Anything else to add here? Will I take a drink? No, I think it does pose some interesting questions for our content generators in the future. Also the level of credibility the AI bot can write with. I've got to say those. Great bios. I guess they would have read a bio for me for my comedy stuff, but it was much better than anything I can come up with. Does this chat GPT? Yeah, it took things I've probably said wrong. Who you are? I think I asked it if it knew who you are and it was like you got something more about the person you're talking about. You've got to put a Canadian ring announcer or this and that. My ring announcer once completely wrong because it says I worked for the NWA and Impact. That's never happened. I've thought about especially the Bing bot because the Bing thing, I won't pull it up here, but it has a different sidebar option where you can tell it to write an email, to write a blog post, you can change the tone, professional, informal, funny or something like that. You can change the length from short, medium, long. I don't know what I'll do this, but I thought about a chef like an AI week where I just have AI bots write business articles about, you know, you should replace me and Gullah with one of us can be the Bing AI bot and one can be the Google AI bot. They can't talk yet though. They can't talk yet though, but it probably can though. You just, you just, but I've seen bitches this week. It's only a matter of time. Anyway, the Russell Nox Patreon, we have a report. I think I'm reporting these every Friday is my decision. Of my analysis of the merchandise sites, I also realized, so I've been reporting Wshop, AEW, shop AEW, excuse me, and PWTs and taking the data, taking the top sellers lists and just saying, okay, according to these top sellers lists, if this really reflects sales activity, these are the most popular items. These are the most popular categories. You talk about this number of times here. I realized Friday and on your Saturday, I can do New Japan too. So I've started to collect that data too. We'll take some time before we can see anything meaningful there. We can finally see those big LIJ, New Japan, versus numbers. We'll see. Those Naito fans are going to be very excited, Brandon. Yes. Yes. It's a little late. I should really should have come to the party a few years ago on a lot of things, but Elle. Sonata Truthers, where we get evidence on Sonata being a big merchandise mover. We'll see. Just five guys' shirts. Yeah. But LWA shirts, dominating the W list for the second week in a row. These shirts that have that are in the Mexican flag colors, the Puerto Rican flag colors, this is all by the way leading up to backlash on May 5th in Puerto Rico. But for the second week in a row, LWA items are at the top of the list for WWE. But the rest of the report if you're interested is there for subscribers at patreon.com slash for salamics along with everything else there. Also here in late April, I came out with an annual report, the Wrestle Linux Pro Wrestling Industry Report that you've all been waiting for for 2022. So that is there for free as part of your subscription, $5 a month, or if you just want to pay $6 one time, you can buy it on payhip. There's links on Wrestle Linux.com if you're looking for it. So stardom. I did wake up at 7 a.m. this morning, Eastern time, and I caught the main event of stardom. Stardom's all stardom. You purchased this paper. You purchased this paper. You've of course I did. Of course I did. I won't be sharing my login with either of you though because I don't want to get arrested. Yokohama Arena. This is in all likelihood stardom's biggest live event of its own ever. The announced attendance, 5,539 attendees. The announced number that would be by Slim Margin would be ahead of the 5,500 from the event on April 29, 2013 in Real Goku, Kukikan. That people in my replies on Twitter say is a totally not legit number. So it probably blew that away and whatever the real number was for it. It may or may not even be the biggest attendance for stardom up to this point. Other than that number, which may not be legit, the stardom dream kingdom, which is at the very end of last year to summer 29th. Also at the Sumo Hall, Real Goku, Kukikan. That's fun to say, isn't it? 3,869 was that attendance. Announce attendance here. These are sourced from KH match, but I believe they're all originally sourced from the stardom website itself. If this is anywhere near a legitimate attendance, a paid attendance, it's blown that number away from late December, which was just under 4,000. This is at 5,000 and a half. I talked to Liam Jones this morning who covers all of the smaller pero promotions for Voice of Wrestling.com. He said that the highest good credible attendance number before this show is 3,800. And that's this December 29th number. Right. Because you can really only trust the data, I think, post- Bushu wrote her. She wrote her acquisition. Yes. Yeah. And other than that 2013 number, this is all 2021, 2022, and 2023. This is the top 10 attendances that I found through KH match data. So likely the biggest show in stardom's history. Mercedes Monet is popular. Mercedes Monet was in the semi-main event against Mayo Iwatani. Main event was Julia versus Tam Nakano. Should we spoil it? Should we not spoil it? I don't know. But reportedly, I think it's according to Dave Meltzer, I think she confirmed this even in the press conference, perhaps, I haven't, not sure. But Mercedes Monet has signed an extension with Bushu Road to continue working for Bushu Road. So we'll see more of her in stardom and or, new Japan. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe this was her last scheduled date on as part of her original deal. Those were reports that she was trying to discredit leading up to this match where she lost the title. Yes. Well, maybe she can start a podcast and she can yell at Brian Alvarez about it. Yes. But it's extended, but we don't know what that extension means. It could be just one more appearance for all we know. Right. So this is certainly the biggest all women's show in Japan in many years. Probably this century, I would say, there's probably nothing else. After 99, I would say that's bigger than this. Does that sound right? If we look at the W Evolution Show, the all women's show from WWE October 28, 2018, according to Polestar, live events data website, that had a gate of $714,000 paid attendance of just over $11,000 at the set, the Nassau Coliseum or whatever it was called at the time in Union Dell, New York, which has just since been replaced by the UBS arena as the main main arena in that location. So that's what that one did. So it's in terms of a gate. I mean, I don't have a great sense of what the average ticket price would be, but if we're thinking, you know, $5,000, let's say $5,000 paid and take a wild guess at average ticket. And ticket prices tend to be higher in Japan, right? It used to be. I don't know if they are anymore. And I was always a standard going back generations that tickets were more expensive in Japan, but I don't know. I imagine WWE tickets are the most expensive tickets in all of wrestling. Should we say like maybe be kind of aggressive and say like $75, $80 or something like that for this, the stardom show? And if we say $5,000, I think being a little bit generous here, $5,000 times say $75,000, you get a gate of $375,000 if under those assumptions. So it's well short of this WWE show, WWE Evolution. Which was so successful, there were a bunch of other WWE Evolution shows in the subsequent years. There has never been another WWE Evolution show again. Despite the $700,000, which I'm kind of joking about, but it was a successful show from a drawing perspective. If you're just talking about live attendance now, maybe a big part of that was the novelty of Ronda Rousey was much stronger. Of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. I don't believe it was. I forget the timeline, but I know the existence of the AEW Revolution show. The show was murdered in early October. So this show would have taken place in the very same one. I believe, okay, okay, if that's the timeline, I'm going to go and say that evolution did exist before the Khashoggi murder. I think what I'm suggesting here is that this is an all women's show that was like a week before WWE's Crown Jewel show in 2018, a show in Saudi Arabia that was under a lot of criticism because WWE was doing its second show working with the Saudi government just after about a month after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents. And women were not allowed to participate in the shows at the time. So there's at least an impression that this was, evolution was a show that was maybe a PR move and maybe a way to give the women's, you know, a big show to do that would take some of the heat off of them doing this crown jewel show in Saudi Arabia. Right, because the women were not allowed to appear on the Saudi Arabia show at that time. That has since changed, which I think has rendered evolution moot. Velka Braka in the probably just mispronounced his name, but I know he's a big Joshi fan and he's in the chat and he says that for the stardom show, he says there were some very expensive tickets, but a majority of the tickets were under 6,000 yen, which is about under $50 US. Okay. In terms of the biggest women's shows in Japan in history, we can of course look at the, I think by far probably is the Big Egg Universe show in 1994 in the Tokyo dome. Did you know that Dave Meltzer was there? He was there. Yes. He's mentioned that before. Has he mentioned that before? Yes. Well, it was his show. It had a five star term in it. $4 million gate is what pro wrestling history.com has probably via the observer. You don't have to really adjust this for inflation, I found out, because Japanese currency, Japanese yen has not really been affected by inflation much over time, at least last few decades. So it's about $4 million US equivalents today. So we don't have to think about inflation too much here, I don't think. The dream slam in the same venue, you'll call them in 1993, $1.5 million. So that too, if this gate is correct, would be well above in all likelihood what this show did, but just to put in some context. The historic crossover show, Tokyo Difraariake in November 7,102, that was a show with both New Japan and stardom talent on it. So there's that. But a big show. And in terms of what's the number, the number one promotion is on WWE, number two promotion globally, I would say ZAW. Number three is New Japan. What's number four? CMLL for sure. CMLL. For live attendance, I mean, I don't know what the actual money generating ability of CMLL is compared to the American companies. The revenue, the currency conversion might have that so low that maybe stardom could be above it. I guess I have this Japanese attendance data to look at here. In terms of average attendance, believe it or not, the leader is maybe it's not that hard to believe that Noah, your today is the leader because it's probably skewed greatly by their Kijumuto Tokyo Dome Show. The Muto Tokyo Dome Show, I mean, personally, Noah also just did 1,000 people in a 15,000 seat arena for a major show. So I wouldn't necessarily say that they're on fire at the moment. So we do have what else that I do. I did median attendance. Here's a median attendance. New Japan is the leader and median attendance here to date. Number two is all Japan pro wrestling. That's unbelievable. This is Kijum run tremendously high volume of shows. I know this is 10 and Sierra, but this is the count of shows. All Japan's are 17 shows. New to date. So they've run a low number of shows. And I would imagine the first quarter of the year, first few months for Algebra, pretty high. I know they have a big show during New, they have, I think they have two big shows right after New Year's New Year's Day and then the day after New Year's. New Year Giant Series. Is that still called? I don't know if they did a Giant Series this year. I'm not going to lie and say I've been watching every Algebra, but I want to say there's there's there's Giant Series in October that they used to run. And then the January New Year Giant Series. I have two attributes to show high Bob. Yeah, I have a I haven't watched a ton of Algebra this year, although I did watch the first two nights of the Champions Carnival, which are going on right now, which is probably helping their attendance because that's one of their big annual events and that's been made up a few of their shows. And like you said, they're only at 17 shows. Okay, in terms of total attendance that we can extract from this announced attendance data, New Japan by far number one with over 100,000 year to date. Noah is number two with over 50,000. That's some that's obviously supported by that big Tokyo film show they did with Kijimuto and stardom is number three here with twenty twenty five twenty six thousand. The the Dragon Gate fans will be screaming right now and it's necessary to point out that out of these promotions besides New Japan power wrestling, Dragon Gate is the only promotion that draws considerably well outside of the greater Tokyo area. And by the way, I know in a lot of cases, especially in cage match, there are some events that don't have an attendance and I tried to extract it. It's minority of events because records are fairly complete, whether or not these are quality records is another question. But I for the for the instances where there was no attendance for an event, I inserted like the median attendance. So we're trying to the count for all all events here if possible. Have you checked in on Gleat at all? No, I don't think I included that in my script. Do you think they're there in the conversation here? I'm not the most knowledgeable about Gleat, but I know from just kind of following answer totally that they've gone into like CoraCon Hall and they've drawn bigger than Dragon Gate or all Japan power wrestling or no one have at certain times. So I would imagine that probably I don't know how many events they've run, but I wouldn't surprise me if they were on the same level as one of these smaller promotions. Is Gleat an abbreviation for something? Gleat who knows? Yeah, like if I look in cage match, is it just GLEAT? Yes, it will just be Gleat. Yeah. Okay. I'm running a script. We'll see if we can resolve from it. Okay. So there's that. Let's finish that conversation. So W, number one, worldwide, AW, number two, new Japan, CML, maybe number four. It all depends on how you want it to survive. Like I was talking about 10 minutes. We're talking about if you believe that, you know, if you believe the attendance numbers that Dave publishes in his CML notes section every week, CML is doing 10,000 fans every Friday night at Arena, Mexico. So like if we're just going by sheer of live attendance number, CML is probably only second to WWE. But obviously they're not as lucrative of a market as they are as a major American company as an AW and the television revenue is probably not even close. I don't know about merchandise and I don't know. I don't even know if their tickets are being sold at the same rate. The gates might be higher for AW even if CML has way more fans. Is AAA come next? Would you put AAA before Star? I don't know enough about like how, I don't triple H, I don't triple H, triple A for you know their major shows and I know they had a triple mini show I think this past weekend. They'll draw over 10,000 fans for those. I don't really know how well they're doing on a week to week basis. I wouldn't surprise me if they're doing comparably very well to everyone except WWE, AW and new Japan. Would you put Star, I think it would put Star and above impact. Yeah, I mean impact being an American. Yeah, what are impacts advantages at the moment? Impacted a great rating for impact standards on Friday or on Thursday. Right, but so we think they're getting a lot of money from that television. They're on a network owned by the company that owns them. They don't seem to have a particularly, yeah they don't draw well from live attendance really at all. Their pay per view sales, I have no idea that would probably be their next best source or revenue. I don't know about that. I mean, NWA seems to draw considerably decent. People wouldn't GCW probably be in a better realm than NWA. That's a good point Chris. I just that you could put GCW in the mixture early on volume of shows. You're trying to get booked by GCW? No, I just bringing it up. I mean yeah, surely on the end of these volumes shows. Small, small venues and they're on YouTube. Who knows how a compensation are doing. GCW is doing better attendance it looks like and they're also on that fight TV+. And then MLW which is reporting that they're selling out like they sold out the 2300 arena and all that. Maybe, I mean, they're doing better than GCW but I don't know. Do you have any other super chats? It's all I got. It's all slides you got. I think that is it. Yes, that is it. Okay, you guys got stuff to plug? Sure. I'm going to be in the Gentleman's Wrestling podcast. We just had a new episode go up a few days ago. It's me and Mr. Warren Hayes. We talked a lot about CM Punk and we talked about CM Punk not really in the context of what do we think is going to happen with CM Punk or what do you think? We weren't fancy booking CM Punk angles and we weren't talking about his backstage fight with the Elite but we were focused a lot on CM Punk's individual star power and kind of why CM Punk has become such a prominent figure to the wrestling media. Why CM Punk scoops are so important for people. Why fans just can't get enough about hearing and reading and listening to drama involving CM Punk and kind of a focus on the unique kind of emotional connection he has with his fans and how that's really different than any other wrestler that has been around in the last 20 years in the sense of how big of a star he is and how important he is to those fans. I mean I posed a question I said that I don't think the rock if he were to appear on an episode of AEW Dynamite would feel as important as CM Punk appearing on that first rampage. The rock would be a bigger star and he would draw a bigger rating but he wouldn't have even the stars because the rock wouldn't have the kind of emotional importance to fans which is what is kind of kept CM Punk as relevant as he has been over the last year. Let's rock up here on Impact a little while ago. Did you look at the Ken Shamrock? Ken Shamrock yeah. That's right. Was that on a pay-per-view then? I think it was. Was that on the pay-per-view or was that on the impact before? Maybe it was the pay-per-view actually. Anything else? I'm just standard Chris Golo handles in a razzle right now Twitter raref. That's all I'll keep up on that. Follow Mac Chris Golo if you want to be follow back. You never know. You'll be doing a lot of comedy dates so if you want to have a laugh getting out there more in comedy so come on out through the show. Okay that's it. You can subscribe at Russellomics.com slash subscribe or patreon.com slash Russell Nautics and the annual report is there as well for subscribers or on payhip if you just want to buy it along. We'll talk to you on Thursday on Patreon for subscribers and we'll be back on Sunday for everybody. Talk to you then. Bye. With one of the best savings rates in America banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions even easier than choosing slash to be in your band. Next up for lead guitar. You're in. Cool. Yep even easier than that. And with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank for details. Capital One and A member FDIC. At Lowe's it's the final days to save on top outdoor power equipment during Springfest. Save now on the latest and cordless outdoor power with ego. Only at Lowe's. 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