JNLister

The thing I don't get about the split 'big' shows is they still stick everyone on the card and wind up with 9 or 10 matches, including a bunch of six-mans and eight-mans. If they really have plenty of top guys over, they should surely be able to literally split the roster across two shows, do six or seven matches on a show, and give plenty of time to all the big matches.

His latest volume (the sixth of a planned seven) deals with his first few years in the US. I didn't enjoy it as much as the earlier volumes though as it feels a lot more kayfabed, even though I don't think that was the intention.

NXT touring doesn't necessarily have to be profitable. It's part of a bigger picture. Working regularly in front of crowds of several thousand rather than a few hundred is a key part of developing talent that can make you money on the main roster.

Why do they have the section of stuff from YouTube? If you've got access to WWE Network, you've inherently got access to stuff from YouTube where it's available for free, and every view earns money for WWE.

Ah, right, gotcha. That's updated now -- thanks again.

Have updated the first of those, which is indeed a typo. The second of those I have as 11 October 1978 in my original source -- where did you get 1 October?

Quite a bit of the stuff from the 12 Days Of Attitude disappeared and never came back. This isn't the same thing as the two or three days of stuff being down while music edits are made. Should also add that the files themselves have been removed, so it's not just a case of them sitting there waiting to be added to a new category. Even leaving aside the fact that they repeatedly promised nothing will be deleted, there's absolutely no reason to remove stuff. There are no licensing issues and server space clearly isn't an issue given what is left off. There's a bunch of stuff I'd have liked to have watched in Black History Month but didn't get time, and the only way I would have done so is if I made a particular point of not watching any contemporary wrestling for a couple of weeks and specifically working my way through the "temporary" stuff. At that point it stops being a useful VOD archive and instead becomes closer to a case of WWE deciding what I have to watch and when. Also, while I'm absolutely clear this is not WWE's intention in any way, it does look a bit tokenistic to put up a load of stuff featuring black wrestlers and then remove it the moment Black History Month ends.

I half-suspect that it's not a case of intentionally deleting stuff as a policy, but more that they've got caught up in some technical or bureacratic loophole. Two of the shows (an MSG house show and a World Class TV) are still available, but both have been moved to the respective categories. It's surely nop coincidence that these are the only two shows where a relevant category already still exists. It's utterly ludicrous that they are deleting stuff while still keeping up things like Smackdown preview shows or the Hall of Fame 2014 Red Carper event.

To it's credit, WWE Network has done about as good a job as they can with the TV shows in terms of music. I was half-expecting them to ditch all the music videos completely, but they've overdubbed them with stock music that's at least the same vague genre as the original. They've gone to particular effort with the November Rain videos which cut between ECW footage and footage of the GnR video -- they've taken all the ECW footage clips, cut them together, then added a new soundtrack.

And the Black History Month stuff has gone. The MSG show and the World Class TV episode have been moved to the appropriate categories but the rest has disappeared. So much for nothing being removed.

May as well get my complaint in now. I can't believe WWE are going with Baron Corbin to headline WrestleMania 36 even though Sami Zayn is obviously more over.

Looks like it'll just be "here's a user name and password, enjoy the online version".

It was SummerSlam 89, not 90, that beat out the WM6 buyrate. Observer yearbooks have WMV doing $21 million total (PPV, live gate, closed circuit) and WM6 doing $19 million on the same basis. The yearbooks also noted the gap in terms of WWF's share of the total revenue was much wider as a higher proportion of WM6 revenue came from PPV where their cut is smaller.

There seem to be a few new uploads, but they aren't brilliantly promoted. There's a few older Inoki matches (including in Brazil) that don't appear to have been up at launch. There's also a "we ask on Twitter what matches people want to see" section: http://njpwworld.com/pg/t_twitter_02

Atresdownloader's latest edition (17.3) now supports NJPW World. A little fiddly, but you can download the videos as MP4s which play on pretty much anything.

You could try https://twitter.com/newjapaneng, which is their official English language account.

They reached a deal with the wildlife group shortly before the network launch, having realised how much of a problem the blurring would be when they were showing Attitude Era stuff.

[nerd]Scorpio did it in ECW against Jericho three weeks earlier.[/nerd]

One big advantage of the Network model is they've found a way of getting money from people who are at the absolute lowest end of the scale of "willing to spend money on the product." They're dedicated followers (as opposed to being part of the 50-75% of the viewing audience who treat it like just another TV show and would never spend money on it), but they feel enough of a disconnect that they'd probably skip a house show and would either skip most of the B-PPVs altogether or pirate them and perhaps even fast forward to the matches they like the sound of. However, when you offer the PPVs and the rest of the Network content for $9.99, you're pretty much setting the bar incredibly low for things to be so bad that this type of fan would cancel.

Fuck it, if they don't think he can be a top star, just send Bryan to NXT for six months.

I loved how the pre-show had Ziggler doing an interview about how his big strength in a rumble is stamina and he can outlast everyone else. Then he comes out at #30.

So the Philadelphia that's the odd renegade city with the unrepresentative fans. That's the same Philadelphia they are reportedly strongly considering for WrestleMania in 2017?

Nash's booking spell stopped people watching. Russo's spell stopped the remaining viewers spending money on the product.

In the US at least, the cover date of a monthly magazine doesn't usually refer to when it comes out, or the period it's meant to cover. Instead it's the last date newsstands are meant to take any remaining copies off the shelves. The idea is that it makes life simpler for staff because they can just take off anything that's hit its cover date without having to worry about checking its publication schedule.

Yeah, I realize he's season 3, but there are a couple of guys who auditioned for earlier seasons, didn't get in, tried again in later seasons and got in then. I thought maybe Morrison was one of them. He is. He's in the first/tryout episode of series 2 and somebody -- I think Dunn -- dismisses him with words to the effect of calling him a spot monkey.