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With WWE’s five-year, $265 million media rights deal with NBCUniversal for Monday Night Raw set to expire in October 2024, long-time Sports Business Journalism reporter John Ourand has predicted WWE will find a new media rights partner in Amazon this year.
As part of SBJ’s annual media sports media predictions column, Ourand predicted Amazon will pick up the rights to WWE’s flagship show and keep the series on Monday nights, hitting an audience of young males and giving the company another marquee night of live programming on Prime Video alongside Thursday Night Football.
Last month, PWInsider reported Endeavor President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Shapiro, WWE President Nick Khan and WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque met with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer Bruce Campbell about potentially moving Raw to the WBD family, and that Amazon had been discussed internally as a potential media rights partner for Monday Night Raw.
If WWE moved Raw to Prime Video, it would mark a significant shift in the wrestling television rights industry as the first major player to pivot from cable television to a streaming service. While some fans might react negatively to such a proposition, there are multiple factors to consider.
The much-debated erosion of cable television and concurrent rise in streaming services have greatly changed the way that television content is valued monetarily, including in the wrestling industry. In years past, a wrestling company might hope to achieve a certain number of pay-per-view buys in order to achieve success. Now, however, the raw data which streaming services – such as the WWE Network (whether as a standalone service or via Peacock in the United States, Binge in Australia and Disney+ in various Asian countries) – provide can allow companies to value themselves much more precisely.
Compared to Nielsen ratings, data insights provided by streaming services allow companies to assess exactly how many people engage with the product and, when combined with the advertising brought in and the sponsorships embedded in the show, use these metrics to define the worth of the company or show as a brand in the eyes of the consumer when pitching to future partners. As such, expect WWE to secure an even more lucrative deal than the $53 million-per-year agreement with NBCUniversal for Raw in 2018. For added context, the NFL’s media rights deal with Amazon for Thursday Night Football is worth $1 billion-per-season.
Alternatively, if WWE is unable to find a sizeable enough deal from other Raw media rights suitors, Ourand predicted Disney could cut a TKO Group deal that incorporates both renewing its current UFC deal and carrying Monday Night Raw on its FX cable channel. Last June, New York Post reporter Andrew Marchand reported Disney was interesting in adding WWE programming to air on FX, not ESPN (which would struggle to guarantee a set night of the week to air Raw due to the network’s amount of live programming commitments). The same report named Amazon as the biggest new player for WWE’s media rights, with Apple and WBD listed as dark horse candidates
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