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WWE Network... It's Here


goodhelmet

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Not to mention they have the power via television to condition people to seek out older footage. It's the same basic principle of how they link in a HOF induction with a DVD.

 

When Bret made an appearance on Raw the other week the commentary started referencing some of his classic matches: it baffles me they didn't mention the fact that fans can watch them all on the network - never mind the possibility of a quick 15 second video package they could have run later.

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As they have hours and hours of footage pretty much ready to go I imagine that someday somebody will decide to randomly upload some 80s stuff, perhaps once they run out of old Raws and they finish uploading all Nitro episodes. Maybe NWA Saturday Night or the entire catalog of WWWF/WWF MSG shows. I don't expect it to happen this year at all but at some point they will run out of ideas to get people to sign up.

 

I mentioned this same thing months ago but UFC still keep putting new live shows on their Fight Pass but also keep buying old footage: they acquired a shitload of libraries early in the year (which they haven't released yet but Marshall said that it wasn't going to be immminent) and they recently bought the IVC events from Brazil, which those in the 90s will remember for their crazy violent brawls with legal headbutts and legal nut shots (Goodridge vs The Pedro).

 

Are MMA and wrestling fans all that different? Who do you trust to listen to feedback and produce unbiased analysis? And who do you expect to go back to the same old preconceived mantras?

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I think Classics on Demand was kind of a passion project by some of the people who work there, where as the Network is the crown jewel of Vince's empire. They decided they want to live or die on original programming even if means the original programming is a bunch of shitty shoe string budget productions.

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The Network saves me at least $40 a month......nuff said

 

It's a tremendous deal for current fans and people who used to buy every or almost every PPV.

Even for somebody like me (I stopped watching WWE months ago) it's still a great deal because I travel a lot and all of this great stuff is available in HQ from my laptop or ipad. I can pop in a random Nitro, COTC or SNME to put me to sleep when I'm jet lagged somewhere in a different continent.

 

Like Loss (and others here at the start) I also had this pipe dream that they'd end up putting all kinds of cool weekly TV there, including their own programs, as well as keep bringing up rare treasures from their vast library. However instead we have a product with a terrible interface, a random upload schedule (and you won't find up what's new unless you go to the unofficial tracker accounts on reddit or twitter) and no pre-Attitude era content. At this point I don't care too much and I don't use the WWE Network much unless I'm travelling. I'll keep watching Georgia and Memphis on youtube as long as they don't take them down.

 

If they were smart they'd create a premium tier where they charge you 5 or 6 extra bucks for regular old territory TV, MSG shows and Coliseum video releases. They have enough content to milk that cow for decades if they want. And if you don't care, you can keep watching your PPV's, Stern Show, etc. for 9.99.

 

Then again I doubt they even have the technology now to have a separate premium tier, as silly as that sounds.

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The Network saves me at least $40 a month......nuff said

 

 

 

If they were smart they'd create a premium tier where they charge you 5 or 6 extra bucks for regular old territory TV, MSG shows and Coliseum video releases. They have enough content to milk that cow for decades if they want. And if you don't care, you can keep watching your PPV's, Stern Show, etc. for 9.99.

 

 

I'd say that would be far from smart for them. So much of their marketing was the whole 9.99 thing (without telling people what they are fully getting for their money - quite wrongly to my above point). The last thing they want to be doing is introducing tiers (i.e. confusion) into the market place. They would put themselves in a position where if they were smart enough to start plugging archive footage, they would then have to bang on about a tier payment system. It would cause more problems than it's worth.

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I totally get how adding old content people like us want isn't going to get the subscriber counts they want, but I can't figure out why they seem to believe its a zero sum game. They can continue to add all the shitty, zany, "original" programming they want and try to grab the lapsed Attitude Era fans and still throw a bone to the people wanting to watch 80s JCP shows. I get not wanting to spend the time doing all the music edits for Mid South and WCCW stuff, but there's a metric shit-ton of stuff that was already uploaded on 24/7 that's ready to go and they just sit on it. It's mind boggling unless it's some "Vince hates southern rasslin" nonsense at play.

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I am surprised by how little I use this thing considering I would have killed to have it three or four years ago. I think the only two times I've used it this month were for the Cinco de Mayo playlist and Payback. (And honestly, the playlist felt closer to a $40 value than the PPV). I just wish they would do something to throw the diehards a bone every now and again. If they were doing new Legends of Wrestling roundtables every month, I would have no problem letting this come out of my bank account. Right now, I have no incentive to renew.

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The Network saves me at least $40 a month......nuff said

 

 

 

If they were smart they'd create a premium tier where they charge you 5 or 6 extra bucks for regular old territory TV, MSG shows and Coliseum video releases. They have enough content to milk that cow for decades if they want. And if you don't care, you can keep watching your PPV's, Stern Show, etc. for 9.99.

 

 

I'd say that would be far from smart for them. So much of their marketing was the whole 9.99 thing (without telling people what they are fully getting for their money - quite wrongly to my above point). The last thing they want to be doing is introducing tiers (i.e. confusion) into the market place. They would put themselves in a position where if they were smart enough to start plugging archive footage, they would then have to bang on about a tier payment system. It would cause more problems than it's worth.

 

 

I'd go back to the root of the problem - the whole 9.99 gimmicky marketing was a terrible idea because they screwed themselves out of the tiers and of basic service price increases anytime soon. I can't imagine numbers would be too different if it was 14.99 instead of 9.99, and the lower number would be offset by the people who will subscribe 12 months a year paying more. At some point growth will stop (if it already hasn't) and shareholders will push them to make more money out of it.

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It's mind boggling unless it's some "Vince hates southern rasslin" nonsense at play.

 

I believe that the people handling programming aren't from the wrestling business, and the people who know about wrestling are too scared to mention it because they'll get laughed at the notion that people want to watch rasslin from dark smoke filled studios full of drunks.

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Somehow it slipped past my radar (mainly because I was still looking at the 1996 section like a dumb ass), but a bunch of 1997 Raws are up now. Still no Nitros, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

 

Well, they only added them the last couple of days.

 

Check this out:

http://www.reddit.com/user/WWE_Network_Bot

 

Daily updates on what's new. There's a twitter bot as well. It's an unofficial bot - just a smart kid that created a few scripts that look new stuff up on the servers every few minutes.

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So.....just had an older gentleman (and self described WWE fanatic) call in to say they just signed up for the Network to watch the show on Sunday but was perplexed no where in the process did it say where to watch on their cable box. I broke the news that they'd need some kind of streaming device, and he wasn't upset but disappointed, He didn't understand why they didn't mention that you needed some other device.

 

Now I'm not relaying this to be all "lol dumb wwe fan", but it's not the first time I ran into this and it's a key thing being missed by WWE. They are so bent on hammering NAHN NAHNTY NAHN, MAGGLE and making fun of people who buy PPV, they forget to tell people what they actually need to own to watch the thing. They had the flight attendant Bellas commercial that did a good job of explaining that exact thing and they've never done anything similar since.

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Posted this in the Chris Jericho vs. Matt Hardy Microscope thread, but it's worth posting here too, I think.

 

I watched the Matt Hardy vs. Edge "Rivalries" show on WWE Network last night. Even with all of the editing and cleaning up to omit Matt's goofier moments, it's amazing how much better and more convincing both Edge and Lita were on the mic during this run. Even though Matt Hardy was angry in real life (justifiably so IMO), almost everything he said still came across like a rehearsed wrestling promo. Whereas, everything that came out Edge and Lita's mouths felt so much more "real." Even so, I still think it's unfair and total bullshit that Edge dominated the feud and eventually forced Matt off of Raw. Yes, this comes back around to Jericho, who was one of the talking heads and sounded like a clueless corporate douchebag once again. He said something along of the lines of Matt being fired "wasn't necessarily fair, but business isn't fair." Gag!

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What did you find objectionable about that line CS?

 

As I said in the other thread, there's nothing "false" about the line, per se. But it's still the type of soulless corporate-speak I'd expect to hear from Triple H or Vince. It feels "off" coming from Jericho.

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