WWE and Netflix are about to enter a brand new era.
From January, the streaming platform will be the exclusive home of Monday Night Raw in the US, Canada and the UK, among other territories.
The deal to take WWE‘s flagship programme off linear television for the first time since it premiered more than 30 years ago is said to be worth $5billion.
With so much money at stake, wrestling fans have been naturally curious about what’s to come.
And while WWE executive Nick Khan has confirmed that the style of programming won’t change moving forward, there is plenty of hype ahead of the move.
Both sides will want to pull out all the stops for Raw’s debut on Netflix, and for WWE, that means advertising their top talent for the show.
The premiere episode will feature some of the biggest names in the company, including John Cena, Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, CM Punk and Bianca Belair.
WWE has also promised ‘surprise guests’ on top of those stars.
Raw looks set to debut on Netflix to a massive fanfare, and ahead of next month’s show, Khan confirmed that records are already being smashed.
He revealed there is so much interest around the January 6 premiere – airing from the Intuit Dome in California – that it has ‘already broken WWE’s United States arena ticket record’.
“That is in six weeks from now, and it’s not even close to being sold out,” Khan added.
“What are the components for that? It’s Netflix. People are excited for this show.”
Clearly, WWE fans are excited for what the future holds.
But the possibility of technical difficulties – like the ones that appeared during the Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fight in November – have been a concern for some.
Ahead of the launch, Netflix addressed those worries.
“Whenever we do any live events, obviously, we want it to go very smoothly for every single one of our members,” chief content officer Bela Bajaria said this week, before noting that Christmas Day NFL games will be the next big test.
“Also to put it in perspective: It was 65 million concurrent streamers. The scale was very big, which is great.
“There was a lot of interest in it. When you test and push something to 65 million [streams] at the same time… you can’t learn these things until you do them.
“So you take a big swing, and our teams and our engineers moved super quickly, stabilized it, and many of the members really had it back up and running pretty quickly.”
“We learned from those things, and we’ve all obviously done a lot of stuff to learn and get ready for the NFL. We’re totally ready and excited for the WWE.”
