WWE’s broadcast landscape is shifting significantly. This fall sees WWE’s current media rights contracts for all three of its televised in-ring programs, WWE Monday Night Raw on USA Network, WWE SmackDown on FOX, and WWE NXT on USA Network, all expire. With professional wrestling enjoying a newfound boom period and media conglomerates placing extreme value on live sports, the demand for the WWE product was astronomical as soon as the three shows hit the negotiating tables. Netflix acquired WWE Monday Night Raw for a ten-figure price tag, USA Network secured the rights to WWE SmackDown, and the wrestling-hungry The CW picked up WWE NXT.
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The CW Sets Premiere Date For WWE NXT
WWE NXT is staying on Tuesday’s primetime slot.
The CW has announced that WWE NXT will premiere on its network on Tuesday, October 1st at 8 PM ET. This continues WWE NXT‘s time slot of Tuesdays at 8 PM ET, a window it has held since April 2021.
“We knew that Raw and SmackDown were a little bit beyond our budget here,” The CW President Dennis Miller said in May. “Then if you look, we have a lot of sports where we have kind of that next tier moving into the first tier here, whether it’s the Xfinity races leading into the Cup, or it’s NXT leading into Raw and SmackDown. So it just started to fit. Then over the course of a couple of months, we went back and forth and got the deal done.”
The CW had been hungry for professional content for a while. The network initially pursued broadcast rights to Ring of Honor after ROH was acquired by AEW President Tony Khan. Khan ultimately declined to go into talks due to wanting to keep ROH as a “free agent” to be shopped alongside AEW when the time came for AEW to explore media rights opportunities. From there, The CW sought out the National Wrestling Alliance, eventually coming to an agreement that saw the NWA air its programming on The CW app.
WWE NXT will be the second of WWE’s three weekly in-ring programs to make the jump to its new network. WWE SmackDown comes first, as it is set to leave FOX to return to USA Network on Friday, September 13th. WWE SmackDown previously aired on USA Network from 2016 until 2019.
WWE Monday Night Raw is known to be heading to Netflix in January 2025, but the specifics of the program remain unknown. Netflix has yet to confirm whether it plans to keep WWE Monday Night Raw on Mondays.
