JNLister

I don't buy losing a significant number of subscribers in August/September, simply because you have to actively make the decision to cancel (and remember to do it before the six months is up.) If they were relying on people having to actively resubscribe, it would be a different matter.

I don't know how true this is, but some wrestlers of the era claim the idea was to create the title for Arion to drop to Daddy, but he refused to do so and they had to have him lose it to Bridges instead. It's certainly a story that makes sense as they did Daddy-Quinn at Wembley in the summer of 79, Bridges got the title in late 79, Quinn took it on Cup Final Day 1980, then they had a Daddy/Bridges-Quinn/Fuji tag match at Wembley in June 80. The working plan was a Daddy-Quinn singles match back at Wembley later that year, but Quinn jumped with the title. I've never really thought it through before, but had that singles match taken place Quinn would have been champ, so there's a good shot they were still planning to put the title on Daddy at that point.

As far as I can tell, there are three main reasons internet broadcasts go wrong: the stream being able to cope with demand, the site struggling with logins, and the actual feed from the building going down. Demand shouldn't be an issue as WWE are in the fortunate and rare position of knowing almost exactly how many people will be watching: cancel out the few subscribers who don't watch live (eg Europeans who have to be up early) and the few who stream on two devices for whatever reason, and for this show at least the number watching should be almost identical to the total number of subscribers. Armed with that knowledge, a pro set up like MLB should be able to cope. The actual log-in process would be the main concern, I'd have thought. It likely helps a lot that they have a two-hour preview show, which should reduce the numbers logging in at any precise moment and the chances of a virtual stampede at 7pm. The feed itself should be fine because they aren't plugging a camera into a laptop that's tethering somebody's cellphone or whatever the hell some indy promotions do. Then again, you are relying on the power supply at the SuperDome...

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the main reasons that stuff is being added gradually is the time it takes to add closed captioning. It looks too good to be automated, so that's a time-consuming job for a human.

I've been trying to make sense of the way some shows disappear from the vault (specifically WCCW) even though nothing is meant to be removed, but then reappear later. Just a theory, but I suspect that's what meant to happen is that they upload it with a time flag that means each show automatically becomes available in the Vault menu as soon as it's aired on the live stream. However (my theory continues) the metadata is mistakenly listing some live stream shows as first run (when they've already been on), meaning the system freaks out and pulls them from the Vault menu until they air again.

Just noticed the price rise to $11.99 story stems from a survey specifically sent to a Canadian user. Is it possible WWE was asking about charging twelve Canadian dollars at launch there? Straight exchange of $9.99 would be $11.10 so 12 would make sense with exhange costs and a buffer against rate swings.

Also, this Wiki seems pretty awesome as it's everything available, in order of date of original airing. http://www.reddit.com/r/wwenetwork/wiki/wwe_network_shows Best bit is that it has direct links that actually work, even for stuff that isn't in the archive/search and won't show up when you try to play it from the advance schedule.

First run stuff: Monday 7:30pm Raw Preshow 11.06pm Raw Backstage Pass Tuesday 8pm: Main Event (may vary depending on taping location) 9pm: WrestleMania rewind 10pm: WWE Countdown Wednesday - none Thursday 4:30pm: Best of Raw (classic editions, not in any order) (Legends house reportedly 8pm when it starts in April) 9pm: NXT 10pm: Superstars Friday - none 7.30pm: Smackdown Preshow 10pm: Smackdown Backstage Pass Saturday 1pm: Best of Smackdown 8pm: Beyond The Ring (DVD documentaries) Sunday - none You also get two new episodes of 1993 era Raw every weekday morning, two or three new episodes of WCCW on Tuesday morning, a few new episodes of ECW in the early hours, a "new" edition of Legends Roundtable, and a few Old Schools, which are old WWE house shows.

For what's its worth, I just asked the @askwwenetwork Twitter account about stuff disappearing and whether it was policy or glitch and they replied "Nothing from our VOD library will be removed unless for a substantial reason." It seems like they are (if haphazardly) getting towards consecutive order on the vault stuff. When they briefly added the shows for next week to the vault (before quickly removing them) they had three consecutive episodes of WCCW which covered the build-up and payoff to Flair-Von Erich.

I'm fine with them adding archive stuff slowly (specifically, as and when it airs on the live stream), but as they own all the copyright there's no real reason whatsoever to take anything down other than being cheap with the server space. The old territorial TV stuff is going to be particularly pointless if you can't be sure that eventually you'll be able to watch a decent run of consecutive episodes.

Somewhat appropriate if the reports of the limited English/heavy accents on the call center staff are correct.

FWIW episode 1 has never been there since I signed up (yesterday). Turns out, you can still get it (and at least one other "missing" Raw episode) by searching for "episode 1". That doesn't work on the console apps with the autocomplete search though.

The Raw archive from 1993 now goes up to episode 13. However, episode 1 has disappeared, which I hope doesn't mean they'll only have 12 episodes up at a time.

Somewhat embarrassing confession for a tech writer, but it turns out my PS3 was fine. The problem was actually that my Dynamic IP address had changed, which confused the proxy service I use (which is a simple one-click fix once you realise what's up.) Fortunately that meant I only watched the first hour of NXT (confirming the "watch from beginning" feature works fine) and went to bed before the stream glitches, which probably would have sent me into a rage.

Having worked perfectly yesterday, absolutely nothing is playing on PS3 now, meaning I've no hope of watching NXT live. Not exactly filling me with confidence for Mania.

Plus they may have been surprised to get so many foreign orders, which obviously screws up the "lets use regional caches for better efficiency" strategy.

Playing about with the search function, ECW TV up to July 94 and WCCW TV from December 82-April 83 appears to all be digitised/chapter-marked, ready to roll out in the coming weeks.

If you're trying to work out the logic of the Vault section, it's all the random shows that are (or are scheduled in the next few days) airing on the live stream. Theoretically that means it'll fill up over time.

It might be now, but it won't be for long given how many people starting out as wrestlers these days grew up as Internet fans.

If you've got access to the WWE Network, you've got access to the Internet. If you've got access to the Internet, you can't make a serious complaint about being unable to see a nipple.

Thanks to the angle, between June 2013 and May 2014, Chikara have not/will not run a single show that lost money. That makes it the best drawing indy promotion angle in history.

What really makes that match isn't just that they're blowing spots, but that in places you can't even figure out what the spot was meant to be.

The most common choice for worst match on British TV: It's the blow-off to one of the few long-term TV storylines with manager Charlie McGee bringing in guys to face Daddy and eventually having to get in the ring itself. To make things better it was the last week of Joint's exclusive contract and was followed the next week by the All Star debut (including a young Jushin Liger and a wacky ladder match) and the week after that the first WWF show.

Mookieghana (posting over on F4W) echoed my thought, which is that limiting the amount of stuff on the system at any one time may not be a storage issue, but rather a way to make sure the browse and search functions run smoothly.

Pre-paid annual subscription sounds like a possible way for non-US viewers to get it if they can find a friendly American to take the cash and then give the gift.