Matt D

I could see them adding Punk for two reasons. 1.) It might be Punk's terms for coming back. 2.) It is a way for Vince to say "ultimately, I am not giving you (the crowd) what you want, but instead I'm giving you what I say you want, which is Punk, not Bryan." Basically, a nutty guy's illusion of control.

I think the medium is the key. It depends on how popular the network is on some level, but this does feel heavily above the curve and I think it's something casuals might jump on either for nostalgia reasons or because they got one PPV a year anyway, and it might get more steady eyes on the product, which, as you said, is pretty hot, in-ring, at least. It's also the sort of character training that's coming in to play with the training center though. I think for the the first time ever, WWE is really investing for the future.

I hate saying this because there's so much room for it to be wrong, but for the first time in ages, I kind of feel like we might be on the tipping point of a potential boom.

This is pretty spot on. If you're going to drop it, then either slowly pare down the selling, or never sell so much to begin with. I'm fine when a different body part is worked on and that part takes precedence in the selling. Bursts of adrenaline can be forgiven if they're worked into the match well or the selling comes back afterwards in a believable way. I'm generally fine with compelling early body part work as "control" so long as the selling isn't done to the point that I don't buy it going away all at once.

I thought the fans were responding to him huge for a while thre.

Would have they been better off if they didn't unify the belts?

At the time I had missed the go home segment and that had really thrown me.

I kind of wonder if the network won't lean towards this. We've seen it in other mediums. There are more shows now that are serialized thanks to on demand/netflix/dvds etc. That would have been almost impossible ten years ago when the big money was getting to syndication and having a show that fit well for that. WWE, over the summer last year, put the entirety of the pre-summerslam Orton vs Bryan matches on youtube, for instance.

And again, the 2/3 falls match built on what came before it and is a lot richer with that background.

This is a tricky point. Does audience matter? Also the general NXT audience is the one that's seen mostly all the episodes on Hulu. This, I'll admit, was aimed differently. That's why this was a bit of a weird match to start with, since it played so heavily on the past matches

In general, we, collectively, were more glad for you for all the really good matches you had ahead of you to watch.

I liked this too but it made it a little hard to buy into the end when both guys were down for an extended period of time. That was after Zayn hit the boot in the corner right, which should have made it more believable, but Cesaro was selling it more like the end of a lucha brawl than him taking one big stunning shot. It was a little thing but I was trying to think of why I liked it more or less than the 2/3 falls match.

I think that there are other factors here, including the shift to the 3-Hour Raws and that Trips wanted to do more tag matches, no

They should just run another live stream test. Like how they always had those Road to Wrestlemania Specials on USA. (Summerslam spectacular, etc)

I think the idea is MOTYC is no longer an acronym but a word pronounced mow-tee-ck

I think the deal with Henry is that MITB was SUCH a huge number and drew more than so many other things and Meltzer bases it almost all on Henry's promo/angle. It hits so many marks that matter to him when it comes to drawing/wrestler importance that he simply can't dismiss it without seeming totally hypocritical.

I feel like there are a lot of guys who are really in the discussion for the first few years or even the first half of the decade but then drop off.

WON says: Essentially, the technical reason some things did and didn’t work, or didn’t work on different devices was because for both video-on-demand and live streams, WWE and MLBAM are using a content distribution network of a number of caching services in various locations around the country. These servers bring content geographically closer to a user requesting it. But they only serve what is expected to be the most popular content. That’s why the live stream has few problems, but some video-on-demand material that they didn’t expect there would be much interest in, such as WCW and ECW PPVs, have had more problems. When a user requests content not part of the local cache, the cache has to request it, taking time and server resources.

While he's turned the corner on Henry as a heel, he's still down on him as a babyface.

I found his 95 finishing sequence a little goofy though. I do think the feud with DDP is pretty fun.

Is 08-10 ECW on the network?

They should play up Orton's last few months and basically make him a Pariah in the locker room, sort of a crazy Crow Sting/early 98 Randy Savage force for chaos.

Dave thinks that Orton is one of the best guys in the WWE. He praises him all the time. Did you send that on to Dave? That's the sort of thing he occasionally runs. I just want to see it out there for the world that Goldust is #1 and the Best.

One thing I hope will come through this, by way of the search feature, is a move away from judging wrestlers on great matches; instead, I hope wrestlers become judged a little more on their body of work and on trends and patterns over time. Also, maybe a bit more watching of things in at least some context, instead of just island hopping from one acclaimed MOTYC to the next.

That's one thing about Cesaro's stuff. He builds off of previous matches in a way that sort of breaks the MOYTC formula. It means people who have been watching will appreciate things more than people who jump in and out. That's absolutely the case for the Zayn 2/3 falls match.