Simulcasts are a good call for WBD. Max is their future. There's a good chance they sell the tv divisions on the very cheap over next half decade or so. Also the 3 year deal is great for WBD too. It gives them a way out if groth continues to be poor (or more likely aggressively negative as it has been.) Its a clear signal that they have little faith in the brand and sets the clock on AEW to shit or get off the pot.

hahahaha weoooooooo AEW AEW AEW!!!! Best promotion of all time? Looking like it I guess.

Its a win/win for WBD. Theyve positioned the brand on their streamjng app which is the horse the company is backing long term. So if aew succeeds hey its on the app. Huge win. If it fails theyre out 12 investor reports. Meanwhile they get to go to.those investor meetings with live wrestling to show that theyre making a real push to compete with netflix move (raw) for move (aew.)

And hey, aew gets to live another day which isnt the worst scenrio that some (one) imagined. Theyve a punchers chance. Its not nothing.

How big of a piece WBD owns matters just as much as the dollar amount. If WBD owns 33%, that means $50 million of the reported $150 million would just be them paying themselves. It is a weird dynamic, because the more WBD gives them, the more they get back in whatever weird accounting practices they are doing.

It also has the benefit to Tony that he can keep playing make believe businessman, which is about 35% of the reason AEW even exists.

Also, they were supposed to get a Billion dollars, and if the numbers and years are true, they didnt even get half of that.

I never heard anything about $1B. WBD definitely doesnt have that to spend. Is that what Meltzer was claiming? I dont follow him and tpww has been down.

I don't think it came from Dave, it came from the Sean Ross Sapps and Andrew Zarians, going back to before they even had Collision. Regardless though, I hope they get the library on Max, would be so much easier to watch the few good things they have and skip all the random nonsense.

I wish these streaming sites would post both full shows and have the shows time stamped for individual matches. Sometimes i wanna watch a card. Sometimes i wanna watch a match. If the RoH library goes up especially.

100% the biggest thing I miss from the WWE Network.

The way WWE Network used to be set up was ideal, with the match markers at the beginning of the match, then a marker at the end of the match before the decision. I hope they use something similar

I think its wishful thinking honestly but i agree

Forgive me for not having any faith in AEW to con even a media entity as embarrassing as WBD.

Every "journalist" reporting this deal has increased the amount from the last one. Dave Meltzer now reports is as $555 million with an option 4th year at like $250 million. In 2 days the reports have increased the amount over $100 million total lol

Yeah, sure, like the company with a $600 million TV deal is going to hold the elevator. COME ON!

How much per viewers is WBD paying AEW? 329,000 is not a good rating lol

Its quite bad. At this point trying to brain storm ways to get people behind it again feels so daunting. The audience that has stopped watching, the bulk atleast, will never return. If AEW started putting on the best show producable on earth it wouldnt actually matter. Lines in the sand have been drawn. Its tribalism now.

That portion is a very significant portion of the wrestling audience. So what do you do? Well there's a lot of wrestling fans out there that dont know theyre wrestling fans yet. In theory atleast.

So do you start courting new markets? How do you do that without reshaping the entire product from the ground up? That will lose the loyalist on principle. And even if you could Kahn clearly only knows how to do one thing and he cant do that particularly well.

Its just a nightmare of an issue.

This really is a fundamental issue that stems from Kahn. They could have never reached their heights without his wallet but there was never any intent on giving the money mark the book. Once he siezed control of creative it was over. There's no saving it with him and there's no saving it without his money. If he'd bring in talent to book and fuck off to run the front end maybe...i dunno.

Its a nightmare....or a plague...a nightmare about a plague.

Its awesome. AEW is awesome.

This is one of the chief reasons why I am genuinely surprised WBD actually gave them a new deal. Even a deal with equity, performance markers, that takes all the advertising and PPV revenue — a completely lateral, or even more one-sided deal than before — still can’t expect to see any sort of growth. It should actually factor in that WWE can counter-program through streaming via either Netflix or Peacock and absolutely decimate AEW’s viewership.

That Dynamite number was atrocious. And it can and will get that low again. The trend of the show losing viewers as it continues suggests that people get annoyed watching it. They are eventually not going to come back.

The deal has to be absolutely no pressure at all. They’re just taking a bath on AEW because they want to play around with PPV and running live stuff on MAX, etc. Or they’re absolute fucking morons.

Even if they don’t have to pay them the full speculated amount (reports say things like “up to”) — the real estate on basic cable should be way more valuable than to be tanking your nights like that.

According to Tony Schiavone, fans who don’t like The Young Bucks are idiots. And apparently most of them are bots. I don’t know how that explains the dip in viewers every time they’re on, but ok.

Tony Schiavone said AEW would be stupid to hire Samantha Irvin because Justin Roberts is the best announcer in the business, so he clearly is a retard lol

Tony Schiavone said AEW would be stupid to hire Samantha Irvin because Justin Roberts is the best announcer in the business, so he clearly is a retard lol

He also said Bryan Danielson is the greatest of all time and Joe Tessitore won’t be as good at announcing as Excalibur.

He’s clearly having WCW dying days deja vu.

Didn't she leave because she wanted to do more than announce?

she did.

Hopefully Tony Khan has given creative control to Bobby Lashley. If you’ve heard his pitch for a storyline with Gunther, we’re in for a wild ride.

CANT WAIT FOR DYNAMITE TMRW

Shawn Michaels ruining Tiny Klown's life again tonight lol

I wonder if BigCrippyZ still watches? :lol:

It’s kind of funny watching everyone big-up this thing early days go radio silent. It was never good, but a lot of people can’t bring themselves to admit they were taken in by it.

I wanted AEW to be good. I started this thread with optimism. But it was very clear from day dot they didn’t know what they were doing. But buy off a few podcasters and you’re in.

Ive never seen one of thier shows in its entirety but tbf i havent sat down and watched a full card of anything probably 8 years or so.

Well thats not true. Ive watched a few NWA card in their entirety but theyre an hour or so

Powerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

NXT beats Dynamite again. I can't wait for seething Tiny Klown's next meltdown lol!!

Meltzer’s was hilarious.

He’s now trying to spin it into a win for AEW.

No Dave, you don’t work for TBS.

I love how his source is “trust me bro.” This is the same guy who tried to take a speculative post by a mark on his own forums and frame it as an internal memo from WBD.

I don’t know how “beating” NXT means more advertising revenue for AEW — which is a sinking ship in terms of popularity, and leaked viewers until it was in the mid-400s. It’s also weird to still be using 18-49 to calculate cable appeal in 2024. Sounds like Dave is a little out of touch on this one.

Last I read was Meltz said NXT did win, but it was.onky because of ECW lol

Now he’s gone and added that AEW are the real winners if you go by a made-up metric.

It wasn’t even an ECW show. It was an NXT show featuring ECW alumni using their WWE gimmicks. And I thought AEW was supposed to be the biggest thing since peak WCW anyway? The main focus of the show was on their women’s division.

Still, AEW fears Nunzio.

Why? Confused by this, what should people be using?

I kept meaning to watch NWA. I feel like it would be up my alley. Did you enjoy it?

Meltzer wrote a piece on Dutch Mantell’s health. He couldn’t help but point out that Dutch has been a brutal critic of AEW (even at its popularity peak). Gross.