JNLister

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.

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.