Bix

Honestly the best part of this is that we figured out at Cageside that Angle, Bret, and Flair may have all has thee same stalker, and Angle had an affair with her.

This could very well be a sign that MITB did strong prelim numbers and they felt Summerslam was better with Punk.

He alienated everyone who helped him get guests and results other than Larry Matysik, who is such a nice guy that he will help out anyone.

They should make the storyline reason for the return be that Punk had decided to test them to see if they'd license "Cult of Personality."

Yes.

http://www.f4wonline.com/more/more-top-sto...on-gate-usa-dvd OH MY GOD

Punk AAW tweets/photo/video link: http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/7/23/229...ow-in-berwyn-il

I saw it as an avatar at another forum. It's a WWE erasing Benoit joke.

From TSM without the awful RSPW.org formatting:

Did you read anything I wrote earlier? I'm talking about the internal logic as a reality-fueled wrestling angle.

A couple random observations: - Whose phone were they using that it's not HD? That's just weird. - I have a feeling that Vince or Kevin Dunn would be leery about showing this on TV based on such an all-star WWE panel being on one of the smaller halls at the con. Also, John: He's still a celebrity on the con floor, there are a ton of explanations you can give for him having a guard and being able to get into the packed panel while con-goers were stuck outside.

In theory that could happen, but how likely is it that Punk would honestly crash the party without letting his boss-in-training HHH know about it first? It's much more probable that the whole thing was planned to some extent. The WWE is pretty notorious for being very strict on its employees when it comes to making public appearances, with everything having to be okayed by the office first. And walking about the biggest fan convention in the world with the title belt and a bullhorn would certainly fall into that category, especially when he's interrupting their own official panel. AS AN ANGLE. Not a shoot. WWE records everything for potential "look at how popular WWE was at this huge event" montages.

I think the IC/Hardcore program switch would be remembered better if someone other than Russo was booking since you know he did it for the wrong reason. The idea that they'd get matches against the "other" champion to help with the buildup makes sense, and they were running a lot of title matches on TV back then. It's not a bad "anything can happen" angle in theory, they just shouldn't have done it as close to WM as they did. It's not that far removed from RVD's TV Title win over Bigelow, where the angle was that he was supposed to be softening up Bigelow for Sabu. It has a lot more internal logic than, say, the "every title changes hands" UWF show, which holds up terribly and suddenly has wrestlers scheduled for multiple matches (including the world champion in a street fight before a scheduled title defense?!?!) in the same episode for the first time ever for no apparent reason.

Dog Collar would be the closest with the Rude cage match at #3, IMO.

It's not that implausible. Punk is a big comic fan, the panels are on a rigid public schedule, and whoever was with him whipped out his phone. Plus they actually planted the seeds for this in the Cabana newspaper interview where he pointed out that Punk had tried to go to SDCC one year but got pulled away from having fun to replace someone who was on official WWE business.

UFC is a real sport. People watch real sports live and they're more likely to be watched in large groups that could split the price. Pro wrestling is fiction. Watching live matters a lot less. Once UFC got momentum, it as inevitable. Sure, they're competing for PPV dollars but there are different elements at play in spending habits.

To be fair, Alvarez and mookieghana did an article about PPV buyrates and what would be a fair price earlier this year or late last year. Also, the HD stream for the PPV in SA was $45 for Time Warner. As far as the HD PPVs go, I'm not sure why it varies by provider, since that's another $4/buy for WWE. Bryan and Chris did more of a wide reaching survey where price was a factor and the answers were the substantive part. Still, before and since I've heard none of the usual suspects mention it. $39.95 was probably the "screw it" point for me but $44.95 is beyond the impossible. It's a terrible, terrible value. I could be wrong, but hasn't Dave Meltzer argued against it being a factor because the 1995 and 1997 price increases coincided with PPV prices increasing? If so, it's a terrible argument based if just because there IS a point of no return for a lot of people, but also the context of the earlier price hikes. In 1995, they went monthly with In Your House filling the non "Big Five" slots. The big 5 were about 3 hours for $29.95 while IYH was about 2 hours for $14.95. Two thirds the show for just half the price. Buys got very low with IYH 3 & 4, and they went up to $19.95 for IYH5 in December, which did worse, IIRC. After that, house show business rebounded. So with a hotter product and the price per hour being the same, they did fine. In 1997, the IYHs went to 3 hours and $29.95 like the big 5, which instantly solved the company's financial woes. The shows were still ostensibly less important than the big 5, but the same length for the same price. This ALSO coincided with a boom period, just a much bigger one. The company also abandoned the priced for rental VHS market when they stopped working with Coliseum Home Video around the same time, which planted some of the seeds for where we are now, although that would've happened eventually with the DVD boom, anyway, when Hollywood also dropped that pricing scheme.

John, you missed a big point: Comcast isn't doing this to increase profits. If you go over the cap and they decide to take action, they're not making money from you for a year. As far as the technical side goes, The best way I saw it explained was on Tech News Today last week when Tom Merritt said they must think "routers with the light on must cost more than with the light off.". This isn't bandwidth, which is a limited resource. This is data transfer. It doesn't cost them more to transfer more data during a month. If it was, why wouldn't more ISPs be jumping at the opportunity? Plus, 250 GB is an outdated cap. It was a lot more reasonable a few years ago when it was an end-run to stop heavy bit torrent usage after they it in trouble for throttling torrent transfer speeds. Noobdy else was coming close to transferring tha much in a month. Now, with so much high quality streaming video content (that competes with them...hmm...), online backup, stuff like Amazon Cloud Drive/Google Music/MP3Tunes, etc, the average person can blow past 250GB transferred in a month. At least it's better than the paltry caps in Canada and Australia. It'll get to the point where a very large percentage of customers will go over cap. It's been a much bigger issue in Canada thanks to the even bigger monopoly and the lower cap. Comcast is a national broadband ISP, probably the biggest, and the US has more robust internet video services, so it could very well come to head What credit card do you use that has transaction fees on the consumer end?

The regular PPVs are only 15 pounds ($24.24 US)? Wow. I knew they were cheaper but not 54% (44% if that includes HD) of the US price cheaper. Are they about that low in most countries outside the US & Canada where they're aired as PPVs? Does WWE get approximately 40% like in the US & Canada or more? Then there's the big question: Would US buys double (or more) with a price drop to UK levels? Their loyal audience is big enough that I think it's a strong possibility. Yeah, they're monthly now, but WCW was easily able to hit more domestically than WWE does now total on most PPV during periods that were considered disastrous for their business as a whole. Also, they had a much smaller PPV universe.

With Comcast and AT&T both capped, who's the biggest ISP without caps now? Verizon? Cox? Locally Cablevision has shown no signs of capping data. Arguably, they've gone the opposite way: For $5 a month you can mirror your PC on a dedicated cable channel if your have their software installed. At any rate, with online backup, high quality streaming video, etc. getting bigger and bigger, there probably will be a big revolt against the caps soon. Having said that, at least with Comcast, they're not doing it to gouge people. There's no higher consumer tier, they dont suggest an uncapped business account (and if you want one hey may require proof that you have a business), and you can be banned from being able to pay them for internet access. It's incredibly strange since it's not like the extra data costs them more. Anyway, as far as my original point goes, there's something that should be kept in mind: There are wrestling/MMA stream sites that charge for monthly access to reliable, relatively high quality streams. People are willing to pay for PPVs, but not get gouged. I'm sure that buys would be much higher if WWE PPVs were still $30 or so. When the DVD comes out in 4 weeks and the retail price is $25, 56% of the PPV price. You can easily find it for $20 (44% of the PPV price) or less. You can keep up with the storyline easily and legally see the PPV pretty damn soon (especially if you live near stores that break street date) while saving a lot of money if you wait for the DVD. $45 is just ridiculous and it's surprised me that Dave Meltzer et al never mention that as a breaking point for PPV buys.

I wouldn't say that, WWE's big decline on PPV got a lot worse when monthly PPVs went up to $44.95 SD/$54.95 HD. As I've said before, this is where being a real sport helps UFC. People aren't going to watch TV the next day or look online to see what happened and wait a few weeks for the much cheaper DVD/Blu ray to watch it like with WWE. Honestly, I bet that if the PPV arrangements didn't force them into charging the same price for official streams, they could have a strong discount stream busness.

I'm guessing this is at least partially to undermine Highspots, especially the line about how "This is the only website authorized to sell Ric Flair® memorabilia." Also, while the business of selling 5 minute phone calls and video chats is pretty embarrassing, Bret Hart, who doesn't have Flair's financial issues, has been offering similar services.

I was wondering how long they'd wait to try that again...

Bryan has sworn to me that it's Dave, to the point that the second time I talked to him about it (Joe Higuchi's death, Epic Beard Man was the first time) he seemed actively pissed off that I thought it was him. It does make sense to me, Dave seems a lot more likely to paywall things so randomly (house show results! TV reports! BABINSACK!) than Bryan.