JNLister

"Probably less risk on the WWE's part. If we compare ratios for Network viewing/RAW audiences in the US and apply them to Canada, they'd probably be looking at 50,000-60,000 subscribers in Canada via the web, which probably wouldn't be worth the cost." What cost?

They're now producing commercials for the fact that you can watch SummerSlam 98 on the live stream this Sunday at 5pm. They really don't get it, do they?

I don't necessarily see that "what gets most views now" = "what we need more of." It's not a free TV channel, it's a subscription service. Current viewing figures only tell you what people who are already subscribing want to watch, not the people who are thinking of subscribing, which is who you need to target. Plus, from a purely anecdotal point, World Class is the thing I most wanted to watch from the selection available on day 1 (once I saw it was starting with the build-up to Flair-Von Erich 12/25/82). It's also the one thing I've watched absolutely nothing of because I've been waiting in vain for them to show in a complete chronological run. Based on WWE's viewing figures, I have no interest in old territorial footage, but that's absolutely not the case. They'd find out if they did more surveys of their user base, which shouldn't exactly be hard when you have their email addresses.

It may be a mistake to assume the people numbering the episodes or uploading them have any clue about what the relationship is between SNME and The Main Event. Is it really dumb to suggest they rehire Rob Naylor to work on the network?

"Big Daddy/Ritchie Brooks/Roy Regal vs. Giant Haystacks/Sid Cooper/Charlie McGhee (11/13/86)" Fair bit of significance to this one, even if it's via hindsight. It was the last match aired by Joint while they still had exclusive coverage. The following week you had All Star's debut with Liger, the returns of Rocco & Nagasaki to TV, and the lunacy of the disco ladder match. Two weeks after that you had the first WWF show with Hogan-Savage from MSG. In both cases viewers must have seen a major contrast. It's also the match that convinced Regal to become one of the few to jump from Joint to All Star, reasoning he'd never improve while working with Daddy & Co.

Irish Whip = fine. It's not something that would really happen, but it has a logic in that one guy uses his power to propel the other. Canadian Destroyer = shit. When you see it, there's no logical explanation for what has happened other than the guy on defense has inexplicably decided to do a backflip onto his own head while holding on to the guy on offense. As a general rule, a move sucks if the only way you can tell who was meant to have delivered the blow by which guy is selling.

Discovery of the day -- I may have previously mentioned in this thread that ITV had a load of reels of film of 1960s shows that is sat gathering dust because they charge a large sum just to play it and see what's on it, then another large sum to get a copy (which comes with no reproduction/distribution rights.) Turns out it's actually just short of 450 reels of the midweek broadcasts. If one reel=one show, that's the best part of the decade covered.

Monday Night Wars is a 20 part documentary series covering the whole "war". It's a completely separate thing to the upload of old full episodes, though will likely start around the same time.

You don't even need to cut any new footage: just use the intro scene from the SNME DVD set.

Ooh, don't forget Rio de Janeiro, which is at 351 W 42 in Manhattan.

Don't forget Norwegia, home of Nord the Barbarian.

The fact that they leave the Raw and Smackdown pre- and post-game shows up suggests there's no reason to think they'll ever take anything down. If server space, database size or menu overload was going to be an issue, there'd be no point having a Raw pre-show from February still up.

Thought you'd be interested to know I interviewed Steve Grey today. He had absolutely no idea the Clive Myers match has such a cult status on the US tape trading scene, but seemed genuinely touched to find out.

Yep, the Network only has the two hour home video version. Looks like WCW screwed up the master recording of the PPV.

Correction on an earlier post. The plan in 1980 was for the second Wembley Arena show of the year (which never happened) being Quinn dropping the title back to Bridges, not wrestling Daddy again. No idea whether or not Daddy would have been on the show as well, though they didn't have any obvious singles opponent lined up at that point.

Each episode is one match (Wyatt-Cena and Taker-Lesnar so far). They show a few minutes of the build-up stuff, the match in full including entrances, then somebody from the match (Cena and Heyman so far) doing a fake post-match press conference while they scroll real tweets from WWE guys and reporters (including Wade Keller).

Also, a bad traditional PPV number for Extreme Rules could mean the cable/satellite firms feel confident about taking a stand by ditching WWE, safe in the knowledge they aren't really giving much up till SummerSlam.

If you're feeling negative, you can spin the report by looking at the fact that if they could only get a million people to pay for a big and well-hyped WrestleMania in some form (PPV or network), it's hard to see how they can ever get much more than a million people subscribing to the network in the US. Certainly two million domestic subscribers seems ludicrous when you look at it that way.

There's also the kids audience for whom "Dad, please can you order WrestleMania as a big special treat/Dad, I kinda hit the order button, that's OK right?" is an easier conversation that "Dad, can you use your credit card to pay for a subscription service so I can watch wrestling all day in the Internet/Dad, I borrowed your credit card, that's OK right?"

They're not gone, just hidden for some reason. Use this list that Jon Lister posted earlier in the thread for links - http://www.reddit.com/r/wwenetwork/wiki/wwe_network_shows To date, nothing that's been taken off has stayed off for long, and usually it comes back with minor edits such as replacing music. That said, the ECW stuff that's come down is the biggest batch of stuff to disappear.

Cut and paste from my post at UKFF: TNA booking makes perfect sense if you think of the creative department as an autistic child. For example, ask a typical fan to describe an angle and why it worked and they might recount "The baddy hit the good guy's dad on the head with a bottle and the dad was hurt bad. The good guy was upset about it and then got angry and vowed revenge, and then eventually he got the chance to get his hands on the baddy and beat him up and it was awesome to see him finally get what was coming to him." Whereas the autistic child/TNA creative would simply recall "The baddy hit the good guy's dad on the head with a bottle." Similarly the autistic child/TNA creative asked to explain the Daniel Bryan storyline and why it worked would simply recall "The small guy with the beard won the title."

That's a possibility but a risk they'd consider. My point is if they don't announce till January that Mania isn't on the Network, anyone who signed up for six months in the fall is going to have a legitimate grievance, particularly if the promotional material still explicitly mentions WrestleMania. On the Hall of Fame, it appears the edits are the removal of the various in-house ads that played between each induction, and an audio tweak so that when somebody swears it's removed and the crowd audio left intact, rather than the audio being cut completely as happened on the live broadcast.

Just heard Dave Meltzer on Between the Ropes say that taking WrestleMania off the network and back to traditional PPV only is a decision that WWE should be taking around January. Am I missing something, or doesn't it have to be done by September/October at the latest so that nobody is signing up for the six months covering Mania under the impression it's included in the package?

Under British law at least, libel is anything that can in a permanent record, so covers TV broadcasts as well as writing. Slander is purely saying something to a third part in person. That said, from a legal perspective both are treated the same, it's just that libel is easier to prove.

Maybe try to put together a guard of honor of his streak victims (minus Bossman.)