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I think it's extremely hard to mirror from that database file into this database file. It also would probably be hard to extract a section of one database file and import it into another... even if they were running the exact same board software. John

Hard to say the DVDVR was "dying" at least in terms of posting as the volume across all the forums was still pretty insane for a wrestling board. The server / hosting side had been a probably on and off for years, but there still were a ton of posts. I don't frequent it much, and read even the 80s project stuff far less than I should. But I'd also hate to see it die. Less in the sense of a link to the "good old days", and more in the sense that it remained a place where folks could still talk about wrestling and other stuff. There are some of those out there, including here. But just as it's a fragmented genre, it's also one where other boards come and go over time. For those other boards to spring up, you do need some large areas for them to spring out of. DVDVR is one of them, certainly one of the biggest.

They went down then came back up: 4/30/1999: $39.2M 4/30/2000: $90.0M 4/30/2001: $125.4M 4/30/2002: $136.3M 4/30/2003: $131.4M 4/30/2004: $130.6M 4/30/2005: $121.7M 4/30/2006: $104.1M 2006T: $63.2M 2007: $98.3M 2008: $108.1M 2009: $119.6M 2010: $132.9M 2011: $131.5M 2012: $139.5M International fees have gone from $18.3M to $50.6M from 2002 to 2012. It's not terribly perfect comps because the WWE has (i) changed their model from selling a chunk of their own ads to just fee based, and (ii) they've changed their buckets over the years. It's not perfect to see what's exactly in the "Ad Revenue" bucket, and think that Ad Revenue + Domestic Fees of $118M in FY2002 is all from the same sort of stuff that is covered by the $80.9M of Domestic Fees in FY2012. It went bad, but they also had been changing the model away from selling chunks of their own ads for year. That revenue peaked in FY2001 and already was down more than 50% by April 2005, while domestic fees more than doubled. Clearly a direction they chose. As you say here: In the US, they've increased their domestic rights just under 50% ($59.6M --> $88.9M) from 2007 to 2012, with 2007 being the first full year where we could see the impact of moving away from selling ads. 50% increase in rights fees in the US in that period isn't a bad thing. The international rights have grown 54% in that same period, so it's pretty similar. I don't think the new shows in the US have driven much of it: their focus in Raw and SD, and those are the prime time ratings grabbers. One of their secondary issues is that the WB/CW "fifth networks" have largely died off as far as paying the WWE good money. Moving to SyFy hasn't been great for the company. The lack of being "hot" is a problem. The NFL and NBA were/are hot heading into their latest rounds of negotiations. College Football has been hot as well, hence the money grab there. The WWE is closer to MLB and Hockey, neither of whom were hot at their latest rounds. Except that those have better reputations than the WWE. The WWE isn't in a bad spot. Good revenue. Their ratings aren't horrid for their channels. There are plenty of ways to keep costs reasonable. Profitable. No direct competition. But they also aren't hot, nor is there anything "new" about them. Soccer/futbol isn't truly hot in the US, though its fan interest and viewership have gone up quite a bit from say the 90s. But the attention it's getting is up significantly, people are talking about it more, you see more international shirts all over the place, there's a general sense that the international part of the came has broken through into the US. It's not as big as hockey... but it's kinda-sorta right below it, just without the type of Sports Center attention the NHL gets. But it is "new" and kind of "hot" on its own, lower level. And that's driven rights up quite a bit. I don't think the WWE needs to get "hot" again to survive. But it probably needs to if it's going to significantly increase its revenue.

Between 2-3M according to media reports. I took a look at DirecTV's recent 10-K to see if a full number was in there, but didn't see one. Is that the number of people who have Sunday Ticket? Or the number who actually pay full price for it? I'm just curious. Not trying to say it's somehow losing DTV money, because obviously it's not. The number of people who "subscribe" to it. They have different tiers. One suspects that they don't count their free deals for new customers: switch and get a year of the NFL package. As far as price, who knows. Different numbers in different articles, and the 10-K wasn't helpful. Confess to not being interested enough to go back through several years of 10-K's and other filings to see if they ever listed information in the past... also not sure how much we could extrapolate from it if it's 5+ years old. In all past negotiations, it's clear that DirecTV made enough money from having the exclusive rights to keep reupping the contract with the NFL. The deal last time around was pricey: $1B per year was more than NBC ($650.0M), FOX ($712.5M) and CBS ($622.5M) paid per year... and those sum bitches got every third Super Bowl and playoff games. Only ESPN ($1.1B) paid more than DirecTV, and they have an alternative monster revenue stream in carriage fees which are sky high. It's also worth noting that DirecTV is profitable: $2B in net income that last three years on revenue that's driven up from $24B to $29B+. If the NFL deal is killing them, it's hard to see.

We've talked about this here a lot in the past when folks over estimate the importance of PPV and underestimate the importance of TV. Two points: #1 - as I said above, and have run into the ground over the years, the "revenue value" of TV Programing is actually higher than the revenue listed in the WWE's filings Explained this before, touched on it above. #2 - we should avoid *over estimating* it as well. Chris (mookieghana) mentioned it above when listing the revenue %. My data is slightly different because I don't list that "other" with TV, but anyway: 2012 Revenue $139.5M TV Fees (28.8%) - $88.9M Domestic (18.4%) - $50.6M International (10.5%) $103.7M Live Events (21.4%) $83.6M PPV (17.3%) $46.3M Licensing (9.6%) $33.0M Home Video (6.8%) $19.7M WWE.com (4.1%) $18.8M Venue Merch (3.9%) $14.8M WWEShop (3.1%) $8.2M Other Live & TV Revenue* (1.7%) $7.9M WWE Studios (1.6%) $6.0M Publishing (1.2%) $2.5M Other Consumer Products (0.5%) $484.0M Total Revenue * discussed in the early post what that appears to be Again, they're pretty multi stream in where their revenue comes from. Live Events, PPV and Rights Fees make up 2/3rds of the company's revenue. In a sense, selling "live performances". On some level, it's a bit impressive that the WWE is able to generate another 1/3rds of it's revenue from other streams. That's not a small number: $157M last year. It's also some high margin stuff in licensing and home video and merch. The concern would be those some of those streams are pretty damn flat in growth. But that could be said about most of the company. The major, rapid growth of the company stopped after Mania in 2001. John

You're adding in the "Other" item from the "Live and Televised Entertainment" Revenues bucket: 2012 $88,900 Domestic Fees $50,600 International Fees Which is $139.5M in fees. There is a $8,200 "other" bucket, but it's treated at the same level as Live events, Venue merchandise, Pay-per-view and Television rights fees. Looking elsewhere in the 10-K: It's likely the two bolded items, which really aren't TV Rights Fees. On my spreadsheet I just tend to treat it as "Other" as it's likely changed it's definition since 1998 and never has amounted to anything supper significant (it's been over $7M just three times). It does look like 24/7 may have been rolled into it the last two years - that was a line item from 2006-2010 then vanished, with Other going up in 2011. I don't treat 24/7 as a typical TV Rights Fee - it's somewhere between PPV and "Carriage Fees". On the profit contribution side, TV Fees are pretty high on the list: $57.3 TV Rights $46.0 Pay per view $29.2 Live events $36.0 Licensing $16.7 Home video $10.6 WWE.com $7.8 Venue merchandise $3.6 WWE Shop $0.7 Magazine publishing $0.4 Other Consumer Products -$3.6 WWE Studios -$5.1 Other Live and Televised Entertainment Not that's not entirely useful: it's not bottom line corporate profit, but kinda-sorta operating profits for those areas. But even that is only kinda-sorta useful: * it doesn't include that big 136.4M of SGA * there's the question of relative TV Rights: $57.3 profit contribution on $139.5M revenue PPV: $46.0 profit contribution on $83.6M revenue Licensing: $36.0 profit contribution on $46.3M revenue So it's Licensing where the profit % is! Except... * it's an integrated company We've talked before about the fact that Raw and SmackDown tapings have historically drawn larger crowds than a normal house show. So some of their value is over there in Live Events (i.e. tickets sold to them). Raw and SmackDown also sell more merch than normal house shows. So some of their value is over there in Venue Merch (i.e. crap sold at the tv tapings). In turn, PPV and Licensing would completely bomb if there was no TV. The reason there's all those hours of prime time TV is because they draw ratings, channels pay the WWE for them... they actually pay a lot more for multiple hours of them. It's tough to get a real value to the company of TV Programing in terms of the revenue impact to the company. It's the Rights Fees... and quite a bit more. The Revenue doesn't fully capture it, and the profit contribution under value it.

Between 2-3M according to media reports. I took a look at DirecTV's recent 10-K to see if a full number was in there, but didn't see one.

Not per year. It's allegedly $8B+ for 25 years, which is 320M+ on average. It's an oddly termed contract as the Dodgers were trying to scoot around the full revenue sharing requirements (somewhere in the range of 33% goes to the League). Some of the deal was for stuff other than TV "rights", though that was probably a lot of bullshit. The Dodgers and MLB settled for less than the full 33%, I think closer to 25%. If one buys the spin on that as the "real value" of the tv side of the deal, then the rights fees are valued at an average of 240M+ per year, with the rest for other bullshit. Anyway... 200M... 320M per year average... it's a sign that rights fees haven't leveled off. John

People have been expecting the bubble to burst for decades. Then you have insane things like NBC paying $200M a year for the NHL. EPL rights went up significantly, despite it only averaging about 300K viewers per game on ESPN, and less on Fox Soccer. Some of it is kooky. The NFL and NBA aren't, and perhaps if anything are "undervalued" if that makes sense. Though the NBA will get a big increase in the coming contract, probably Stern's final gift to the owners he's made so much money for over the years. That's not even getting into the Lakers having a $200M *local* tv deal, and the Dodgers in that range as well.

The question out there is that DirecTV might not want to pay an "exclusive" premium (which is $1B a year) for the package. Instead, take a non-exclusive deal, with the NFL in turn being able to sell similar deals to the other major carriers: Households 22,802,000 Comcast Corporation 19,223,000 DirecTV 14,133,000 Dish Network Corporation 12,422,000 Time Warner Cable, Inc. 4,916,000 Cox Communications, Inc. 4,520,000 Charter Communications, Inc. 3,472,000 Verizon Communications, Inc. 3,314,000 Cablevision Systems Corporation 2,987,000 AT&T, Inc. 2,177,000 Bright House Networks LLC That was data I found last year... most of them other than Verizon and possibly AT&T are bleeding since then. Anyway... A non-exclusive would likely be in the form of the NFL getting a % of each subscription. DirecTV has 2M+ subs at $200+ per sub. Now the NFL is a driving reason a lot of those people are on DirecTV, but still... if it were on every major carrier and the NFL got 10M subs for it at $200 a pop, that's $2B. Give the carriers 25% (basically they have to take no risks and just carry it), and the NFL pockets $1.5B. 10M subs seems too high? Okay, a simple bump from 2M to 5M. That's $1B. And instead of a rather silly 25% cut for the cable compaines, many of whom will be happy that DirecTV no longer is using the NFL to suck subscribers away from them, how about 10%. That's still a cheap $100M that they divy up for doing next to nothing - they already have a load of "package" channels set aside high on the guide. So the NFL gets $900M, at a time when all their other packages have gone through the roof... and the potential to grow that 5M base. And also make all those carriers happy since they're getting some revenue they didn't before, while also eliminating DirecTV's major tool against them... hey, did the NFL just make those folks who carry the NFL Network happy? Of course it could go in another direction: Revenue $127.4B AT&T $115.8B Verizon $29.7B DirecTV Operating Income $13.1B Verizon $7.5B AT&T $5.0B DirecTV AT&T and Verizon are looking for wedges to drive viewer to them away from cable and dish. What was the tool that DirecTV used against the cable companies? The NFL. So what if AT&T and Verizon decided to join together on a package, each paying say $600M a year for it ($1B --> $1.2B), and used the NFL as a loss leader to not only steal that 2M+ DirecTV subs, but also some folks who had been thinking of leaving cable but didn't really want one of those dishes on their house/apartment? Verizon and AT&T have money to piss away. There is next to nothing they could get that would make as much of a splash for Fios and U-verse than getting the King of TV, the NFL. No matter how one looks at it, the NFL has all of these folks, networks and carries, by the balls on some level. John

They aren't squeezing out the profits. Think technological innovation: dvr and other newer ways of watching stuff. Live Sports are one of the primary genres of television where a large % of viewers still feel the need to watch it "live". Watching a program "live" means you have a higher chance of watching a commercial. Watching it of the DVR means Fast Forward. Watching it via On Demand means fewer commercials - it use to mean just 1 at the beginning, but the last time I watch an episode of a show that I missed dvr'ing, I noted the "commercial breaks" now had an actually commercial, and they're making it harder to FF through all the On Demand programing. On the other hand, it was just 1 commercial in a break, and at times it was pimping other programing. Online viewing will have a commercial, but again fewer than on TV. This is a reason the networks have chased certain sporting rights, and bid up the fees: it's near-unique in current TV. It's likely to stay a "watch live" type of programing due to social media: in my feed, pretty much everyone had given up bitching about Spoilers on sporting events. Everyone seems to know that people are going to talk and post and tweet about them while they go on, and that if you want to avoid spoilers, you need to STFU and GTFO of online. In turn, advertisers are paying more for slots on sporting programing. Good demos. People will see the commercials at a higher rate than most programing. Easy to target you ad buys to different demos. None of that is getting into what ESPN does with sporting programing, especially the NFL, when it comes to carriage deals. In turn, it's highly likely that the other networks are starting to leverage their NFL programing (and other sporting programing) with respect to carriage fees... at a time when there's some push back on them going upward. Also, if we ever go Ala Carte (which I think is a wee bit less likely than most), sporting content is going to be a key driver in people making sure to retain ESPN/ABC, Fox, CBS, and NBC in their monthly order. Which will also make someone like TNT more desperate to retain the NBA: without it, a host of people wouldn't give two shits about keeping TNT in their Ala Carte package. Anyway, one can look at Disney's financial reports and see a picture of what a monster ESPN is in driving their revenue, and also in its profits.

Unlikely to be back on the gravy train. She may make an appearance like she did with Tough Enough, but as a regular is doubtful. Even a cameo is questionable because she knows that Creative, Vince, Trip and Steph couldn't help but have a load of Clooney barbs tossed at her during the appearance. Doubt she wants that. How Much Did Stacy Keibler Make By Dating George Clooney? As I was saying, she doesn't need to go back to the WWE, even for a cameo, unless she thinks it's a positive on her other opportunities. Not just financially, but also with her next potential partner. John

Unlikely to be back on the gravy train. She may make an appearance like she did with Tough Enough, but as a regular is doubtful. Even a cameo is questionable because she knows that Creative, Vince, Trip and Steph couldn't help but have a load of Clooney barbs tossed at her during the appearance. Doubt she wants that.

That match is widely available. It's the 60 minute draw on the card before that's never been released. Pretty disappointing set list. John

Sunday Night Football was the #1 show on TV last year, with terrific demos. In turn, the NFL is the highest rated show on Cable and has been a monster tool used by ESPN to get massive carriage deals out of the cable / dish / tv companies. Then there's the Fox and CBS deals, which draw more Sunday afternoon eyeballs than anything else. Oh... and Fox, NBC and CBS get to rotate around the biggest cash cow event in the US every third year, with the Conference Finals starting to draw larger and larger numbers as well. The NFL on TV is a cash cow.

I think they're part of the work. Also suspect that a massive amount of the alleged "purse" never comes remotely close to the fighter. John

Rumors Matches with screwy stories attached to them, true or fake. Screwjobs, double crosses, "shoots!", etc.

If it was a fix, Anderson wouldn't have made himself look as big of a fool, nor made Weidman looks as undeserving. You can get across "lucky punch" or "can knock anyone out" in a way like GSP vs Serra did, which didn't make GSP look like a fool and got across Serra had a puncher's change that GSP had to avoid in a rematch. This one made both look bad. As far as PTI and Around the Horn, ESPN isn't behind MMA, and the folks on those shows are largely old sports reporter hacks rather than the younger generation that would follow MMA. John

Again... I'm just not buying those numbers. I'd really love to see one of these guys tax returns. I suspect it would expose this as all utter bullshit.

All the networks make a killing off the NFL, especially ESPN. None of them are losing money, or even coming close to "don't really make anything at all."

Hell... Bobby was probably self medicating to get his way through it. No need for sympathy.

I have no idea how boxing generates the revenue to pay those two a combined $2.6M It really makes you think that the numbers are worked to give a false sense of how boxing is doing. That fight was in Ontario, CA... not at a Casino... I can't imagine that Boxing at the Berto-Guerrero is really driving a big subscriber base at HBO these days... are they just willing to toss that much around (in addition to all the production costs and Talent costs since none of them work for cheap)? This is an era where even ESPN is cutting costs left and right so they can prop up Disney's bottom line, and also save their cash for rights fees of stuff that drives ratings.

I am in awe of Jerome getting through THAT WEEK and being able to carry on without feeling the need to jump out of a 30 story high window. John

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How did it work though? What's keeping the people going back week in, week out? Fans wanted to see them get knocked off. June 12, 1961 Blassie over Carpentier August 23, 1963 Bearcat Wright over Blassie Los Angeles basically went two straight years with Blassie and Destroyer as Heel Champs. They did a lot of business. The run "ended" when Bearcat won the title, which did a lot of business... but they shot that in the foot by looking to take the title off Wright. Bock was the champ in the AWA effectively from 1975 to 1984, with the short Gagne run being the only significant break. Within the "AWA", he wasn't a "traveling" champ. The AWA was similar to the WWWF/WWF: it had it's own large territory. Bock would travel outside it, but the vast majority of his job was in the AWA.