WWE continues to spearhead the evolving entertainment landscape. The sports-entertainment giant put pay-per-view on the map throughout the late 20th century. In 2014, the company launched WWE Network, roughly five years before the streaming service boom swept the world. Now, WWE has pivoted its flagship show off of cable television for the first time in its 31-year history. WWE Monday Night Raw is set to livestream on Netflix beginning in January 2025, a move that bears similarities to the NFL’s pivot of Thursday Night Football to Prime Video and MLB’s shift of Friday Night Baseball to Apple TV+.
Switching networks has been common practice for WWE, as WWE SmackDown has hopped from SyFy to USA Network to FOX all within the past decade. Unlike those moves, this change represents the first time that WWE will move one of its televised products to a streaming service.
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Triple H Says WWE’s Move to Netflix Will Be “Easy”
The Game is not blinking ahead of WWE’s seismic shift.
Speaking at Sports Business Journal’s Congress Of Sports, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque noted that he believes “95 percent” of the WWE audience will immediately follow WWE Monday Night Raw off of cable television and onto Netflix.
“That’s where the world’s going. It’s easy for our fan base,”Triple H said. “We have a long history of changing locations and a massive amount of our people, like 95% of our audience, just completely comes with us. I think this will be no different.”
Netflix acquired the WWE Monday Night Raw media rights earlier this year, dishing out $5 billion dollars for 10 years of exclusive distribution of the product. With over 250 million subscribers, nearly quadruple the amount of cable subscriptions that exist in 2023, Netflix offers WWE a massive pool of potential new fans.
“It’s a great entertainment product so having something that we can have on weekly 52 weeks a year,” Netflix VP of Nonfiction Bandon Riegg said in February. “It has a very passionate, dedicated fanbase and I think many of those we have on Netflix as members already. The beauty, to me, is they’re going to be able to tap into a much larger audience. Introducing it to a new set of fans as well as servicing existing fans that were either already Netflix subscribers or will come over. Either way is a win. The truth is we don’t know how much bigger it can get.”
WWE Monday Night Raw moves to Netflix in January 2025.
