JNLister

Actually I do see a lot of WWE and UFC stuff that says Sky Sports. Not to go off on a tangent, but does anyone have any sense of why that is? Cable provider feeds easier to rip there? EDIT: saw anarchist's posts - there's plenty of high speed internet in the US, so unless the UK internet is way faster than we can imagine here, not sure that would explain the difference. Just guessing, but given the shows finish at 4am over here, it may make it easier to either set a file transcoding or upload it to a torrent site at that time given there's less demand on the broadband network and you aren't likely to need to use the computer yourself.

Will they even bother geo-blocking while it's still only available in US? I'd have thought the real problem would be signing up in the first place as you'll presumably need a US credit card.

http://www.plr-dpp.ca/

It's children born in 1982-2000 (and thus reaching adulthood this century), also known as Generation Y (ie, after Generation X). More specifically, it's the children of the original baby boomers, hence the name.

Within a single market, absolutely. However, that difficulty isn't as severe if going online means you can take it worldwide rather than be restricted to the US or North America until you work out country-by-country cable deals.

If there's no PS3 app I'd be shocked. They just got online with PS3 for WWE PPVs in Q3 this year, so it would seem natural that supporting that console would be part of the roll-out plan. That's actually via a Sony app (Live Events Viewer), though the PS3 is one of the devices WWE absolutely needs to develop for to make the network work. Annoyingly that's not on Playstation Network outside North America. Got to assume WWE will be gung ho about rolling this out internationally as that may make a significant difference to the chances of this being profitable.

I hope somebody clues WWE into the PS3 browser having outdated Flash support which the user can't update.

About two days after launch, I'd imagine the video quality on the illegal downloads will be identical to what's on this service, if you catch my drift. I suspect the $10 price is partially the idea that even people who can quite easily get the content online without paying will just decide they can't morally justify to themselves pirating it for the sake of ten bucks.

One big downside of WWE network being online from a viewer perspective is that not being on cable means you can't DVR it. That means that unless they put everything they air up as on demand as well (rather than just the PPV library they talk about), there's going to be a lot of stuff like old territories shows that you have to watch "live" at whatever hour they choose, or faff about with some sort of stream recorder software.

Fascinating stats this week about pay-TV formats across the age groups: as of October, 43 percent of Americans age 18-36 subscribe to Netflix, compared with 46 percent subscribing to cable and 16 percent to satellite TV. http://mashable.com/2013/12/05/netflix-cable-users/

Does broadcasting online only rather than on TV make any difference to music rights?

The commercial release cuts out the first four matches and goes straight to Midnights-Southern Boys, so it sounds like Turner Home Entertainment have got your back

This is partly the effects of having three hour shows and partly the way WWE works, but one linguistic "quirk" that gets me is when they decide on a phrase and then absolutely run it into the ground. Somebody clearly just heard about the Miley Cyrus deal (you know, from three months ago) and it seems like every other match has to have a barrage of "twerking" references.

Latest US survey is that 76 percent of American adults have Internet access at home, 9 percent use the Internet but only outside of their home, and 15 percent don't use the Internet at all. A separate survey from the same company found that three percent of Americans use dial-up at home and 70 percent have broadband. The "missing" three percent may just be statistical variation, but could also be people who have smartphones but no computer. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/No...rnet-users.aspx http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Broadband.aspx

The new Observer says there's talk of WrestleMania being free on the network for this year only, the idea being to get the biggest possible takeup on day one and then hope a large proportion of people don't bother cancelling. The problem is that although that strategy looks viable on paper for WWE, the cable companies would be very unhappy about giving up Mania PPV revenue.

I can't see them launching on WrestleMania night. That's surely the worst possible day to ask people to pay more money, particularly when the main selling point is that you get every PPV *but* Mania for free.

Pretty much all the Vader (Bull Power) vs Otto Wanz matches are like this.

I forget which one it is (maybe the one where he's interviewed with Heenan) but one of the Cornette shoot interviews has a bonus feature where he gives a tour of his collection.

It would be amazing if they just turned it into a jukebox. They stick a database up of everything in their digital library, you go on the site and click a tape/segment you'd like to see, they schedule the requests in order during certain slots (eg outside of the peak time that has regular programming) and you get an e-mail alert telling you when your choice will be airing.

I wonder if this could be a case of: 1) They realise Tanahashi-Nakamura is bigger, want to put it on last, and need the voters to give them an excuse. 2) They want to put Okada-Naito on last, know it's coming off as the #2 match, and will rig the vote to try to boost its perception.

FWIW, I'm 99% sure that The Wrestling Channel in the UK was Free to Air, meaning anyone with a dish could watch it, even if they didn't subscribe to Sky TV.

Had the HOF been going in those days, he'd have been eligible in 1987. I wonder if the "he's gone fat and lazy" would have been substantial enough or have been a factor long enough to affect his standing with voters at that point.

I've found it helpful to start watching the WWE weekly TV on YouTube. It means you can get it covered in a decent amount of time (40-50 minutes Raw, 20-30 minutes Smackdown, 5-10 minutes for Superstars/Main Event), but you aren't sat there with the fast forward button getting depressed by going "this looks shit, this looks shit, oh god there's another 90 minutes to go.) YouTube has the final 2-4 minutes of every match and the key parts of the promo segments, so watching this way you get a better handle on what's happening than you do winding through stuff at high speed, but you miss a lot of the tedious stuff. The only downside is that you might miss a really great match, but I usually find somebody will have mentioned it on Twitter if that's the case so you can seek it out in full.

One (very minor) limitation to mookieghana's formula described above is that it doesn't account for performance in the year which somebody gets into the Hall of Fame. I suspect a lot of people who voted for Tanahashi this year were taking at least a little and possible a lot of account of his 2013 work/drawing. That won't be reflected until this year's awards, at which point I suspect his "awards score" will improve dramatically.

Looking at the numbers, I wonder if anyone will get in next year. I don't see any of the new candidates making it, but there doesn't seem to be anyone coming close this year who's category is going to open up next year. The category most affected by this year's results might well be Japan (people voting only for Tanahashi this year who don't vote Japan next time), but nobody seems in a strong position to capitalize. Karloff Lagarde is probably the best bet to get a push over 60% from the Lucha category opening up, though he's listed as having 29 votes, which doesn't add up -- either the 29 votes or the 52% must be a typo.