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Jim Varsallone, Miami Herald: With Full Sail, is there something in place, a contractual agreement, that we're going to do NXT live for a year, for two years, or something like that with them?
Triple H: So it's a funny thing with Full Sail. I know we have some things papered, but very little. We almost just ... The very start of Full Sail, I heard about this university here that did all the things we did behind the scenes, and that it was this crazy, wonderful place and I wanted to see it. And I walked in not expecting, because we were just still looking for the Performance Center and everything else we were going to do. And I walked in there, and I walked in Full Sail live for the first time, and it was empty. But it had a tron on one, and it was in this empty studio, and I was like, "I could shoot TV in here." And that was the idea. And we went to them, we talked about it, and they were like, "All right, we'll think about that. Let's put something down, and we'll let you pilot an episode here." And we did it, and it worked, and it was good for them, and we started talking about how we can do it, and how we can make it benefit. They're a college, so, "How can it benefit your students? How can this? How can it that?" And we created this wonderful partnership between the two of us. When I say they're some of our best partners, I really, really mean it. When this opportunity came up, we sat down with them and we're like, "Look, this is our intent, it's to stay here. Don't know that this will work for you. You're a college. Every week, can this work?" And they were like, "We're going to have to look into that. Let's see. And we would love to make it work, and how can we make it work? And there are some things we'll have to do differently, and some things will have to change," and, "Hey, we'd like to change this," and there were some things that we wanted to change about the facility. And they were like, "I don't know," but then we showed it to them and they were like, "Oh my God, that's amazing. We'd love to do that with you." And we have this wonderful partnership with them that's hard to put into words, and it's just continuing on and I think part of the secret sauce when people look at NXT is, is this building, the fan base that's there, they've created. Not every single one of them, but a lot of them have been here since the first shows, and they come to everything, and they supported it from day one. When I say, "We our NXT," I as much mean them as the production people that are here, the talent that have worked on it. We put money in the scholarship funds. There's so many... Now, when I'm at other places out ... I was on the Fox lot a month ago and a kid came up to me and he introduced himself. He said, "I work here on Fox now," and he had a big project he was working on there. He said, "I worked on NXT with you at Full Sail, and thanks for the opportunity. That experience got me here." And to hear that, this is incredible. To see that partnership, NXT is about the growth of all this stuff. We said it in the beginning. We're training camera guys, we're training sound techs, we're training everybody, and Full Sail's a huge part of that, so our partnership with them is massive. I can't state it enough.
Varsallone: Is there a Plan B? Real quick, is there a plan B? In case one week, something happens unfortunately at Full Sail live. "Uh-oh, where are we going to do the show?"
Triple H: Yeah. Yeah, there is. And we have that in place. We have a couple of contingency plans of places that we could go and, "Hey, if we needed to real quick, we're going to pull out of there, drop anchor here for a week, and go someplace else." I hope we don't have to do that, but you never know, right? And there's been opportunities before where we've come in here and you've seen it here where, for whatever reason, Full Sail had something happening here that they just couldn't move and we had to go down the road, or we went to Center Stage or different places. They have moved mountains for us to be here, at various times, and to be here on a weekly basis, which is greatly appreciated and we do everything we can in our power to stay here, as much as possible.
Fritz: When it comes to expectations from USA, what are they looking for? Whether it's a rating or just an audience growth over the next year or so, you'd say?
Triple H: It's hard for me to say exactly what they're looking for, longterm. I know they're thrilled with where we are, right? All this came together really quickly, in the tail end of it as we were just going from, "Hey, the deal's done," to executing. And we never really got into the, "Hey, the expectation is this," as funny as that sounds, because I think we just all inherently, we've all been together so long with USA, we inherently know what we're looking for. When those ratings came out after the first episode, and I spoke to Chris McCumber at USA, they were thrilled. Beyond what they were hoping for, beyond where they were expecting, and thrilled. So now for me, it just becomes, "I know what we can do, and I just know that I want to grow it. I want to grow it bigger." I learned early in the process with NXT, when somebody first suggested that we go to Barclays Center for a TakeOver, and it was the first thing I'd balked at when it was thrown at me and I was like, "Oh my God, Barclays Center, I don't want to go there and be half full, and I don't think that's a good idea." And it was pushed on me. "Do it." And I was almost resistant to doing it, and it sold out immediately, and I was like, "I'm thinking too small. I have to ... " It made me sit down and reboot my thinking to think, "I need to think outside of the box of where I'm at and think bigger than this." To me, sky's the limit on this. I want this to be every bit of the brand. If we can build this up to where it, in some manner, and I know we look at it ... you look at it differently, you say pop music, but I want it to be as big as Raw and SmackDown on a certain level. That's the goal, anyways. "Can I get there?" We'll see.
Johnson: How have the production concerns for the show changed? Especially with production people now working on Raw and SmackDown on Mondays and Fridays, how does that change the makeup of how you're producing NXT? And how does it change, commercial breaks and network concerns, how does that change the feel backstage as you're producing?
Triple H: There's a lot more increased scrutiny, right? Of, you got to get off the air at certain times, certain commercial breaks, certain this, certain that, talent have to hit their time cues. It's something that we work on here anyways, because you want everybody to be ready for that opportunity when and if it comes, Raw and SmackDown, that's how it is, right? So it's something that we always work on. For the last year, we've put an extreme emphasis on that because we knew something like this was coming. From a production standpoint, we've also as a company known this was coming, and you've seen us experimenting with different shooting options and techniques, and doing smaller live event broadcasts, and then doing mixed level of broadcast, and larger ... You see larger Raw and SmackDown productions, you see larger pay-per-view productions, you see smaller, standalone TakeOver productions where it's not so much about the bells and whistles, it's more about the in-ring, so you can scale that down and make it more down and dirty and gritty, what it should be. But you also see then, just the straight up capture content. And so, different formats, but putting all those people in place across all those options, that has been something we've been working on for the last year, year and a half, or maybe longer than that, so that when opportunities like this do come, you have the people in place. It's just pulling the trigger of where they go. Are people busier? Yeah, yeah. Right now, there are some people that that did Raw, and then they flew here, and they're going to do this show. I'll leave here tonight and go straight down to LA for SmackDown. Not everybody will do that. Everybody will move around and do bits and pieces, and we'll keep everybody where they need to be. And the one great thing about what we do, there's a lot of people out there that do this. It's also part of the great partnership with Full Sail. When I talk about the growth of this, we just have the same camera guys all the time. This opportunity created a different place, so a lot of our big camera guys now came out of here. And those camera guys that were camera people, now they're directing and producing at a different level, and different people are doing the jobs they used to have. And now you have new people here doing this job here, but they're ready to bake up when the time is right. So you're constantly building this bench of all the jobs that we have in WWE, across everything. So all this growth is phenomenal, but you have to be ready to grow. If you just, all of a sudden, the opportunity is there and you're not ready for it, then you're in trouble. But you have to see ahead of it, plan for what's going to come in the future, and plan for that growth. And that is the key of doing this systematically, that growth. And not just going like, "Well, we had an opportunity to do this now, so let's just do it now." You've got to say, "We have the opportunity do this now, but let's hold off and do it here because it's better. We can prep for it, we can prepare for it, we can be ready, and we can knock it out of the park, instead of just getting up at bat and taking a cut at it."
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