WWE News: Internal Panic over the WWE Network Launch
By BleachersReport
As many fans will be aware, it was reported this week in an in-depth, much-talked about article by Sports Business Daily that WWE's long ballyhooed network will be officially launching on April 1, 2012.
This is, of course, the same day as Wrestlemania 28. While debuting the network the same day as your biggest event of the year may seem absurd on the surface (boy, will that be one busy weekend), it is presumed WWE's idea is that mainstream interest in wrestling will be at its peak at this point, thus making it the perfect time to get the channel off the ground and promote it to the masses.
Sports Business Daily also noted in their article that the company plans to hire a whopping 200 people to work on the network. For some perspective, WWE itself currently has 500 employees, so the workforce is going up almost 45 percent. Even for a large, profitable company like WWE, that is a huge deal.
WWE also played their first official ad for the network on Monday's Raw, which promises, among other things, "classic programming" and "live in-ring action" (presumably little-watched B shows like NXT or Superstars), as well as a show called "Legend's House," with various wacky and eccentric stars of wrestling's past all living under one roof in what sounds like a bigger trainwreck television than your average episode of
Jersey Shore.
While this project has been talked about for some time and Vince has made no secret of his ambitions in this area in the past, many fans and critics have still been taken aback by how fast all this is all happening. April 1? That is less than five months away to plan and launch what is surely the grandest, most ambitious endeavour WWE has undertaken (failed projects like the movie company and the WBF look like small potatoes compared to this).
According to Bryan Alvarez in this week's
F4W Weekly Newsletter, there is also widespread concern in WWE about the early launch date, with the feeling internally being that the company is nowhere close to ready.
WWE doesn't have a network head, any upper-level staff, nor have they hired even close to the 200 people they'll need to staff their facility. It's said to be a panic situation inside WWE among those whose job it is to get this project ready by the now-official launch date, and many are concerned that if roles cannot be filled by new hires, they'll be filled by those already working for WWE – in other words, a massive increase in an already extremely stressful workload. WWE ran a commercial for the channel on Raw, and the only concept show they revealed was the one where all the old wrestlers are living together in a house.
Certainly, the fact that they have not even found someone to head the channel is extremely troubling. In fact, considering the importance of the role, this is a position that has been filled some time ago. Although there is also the matter of whether any reputable television executive would even
want the stress of dealing with the erratic Vince and a network launch that appears to be in complete disarray.
It is also worth noting that while the company told
Sports Business Daily one of the first priorities was to become available in 40 million homes, no carriage deals were actually announced in the article (and certainly, to get to 40 million homes, they would need a few deals in place with Cox and Bright House Networks, Time Warner, etc.).
Alvarez notes that WWE
have had negotiations with cable giant Comcast for months, but many television insiders are dubious about WWE's prospects about getting significant carriage deals, especially when the NFL network (which obviously has far more appeal than a pro-wrestling channel) has struggled greatly to forge links with cable companies and gain wider availability.
Former WWE writer Court Bauer (who still maintains a great deal of sources in the company and television industry) also expressed concern about the company's lack of preparation for the network when he spoke to Alvarez in a radio interview last month:
I met with someone recently that works for a major partner of WWE's and they are just in disbelief and they don't believe it is going to be able to launch in April. It's gonna launch, Vince is adamant it's gonna launch, but they don't have a business plan. They don't have anything that details what this is going to be, they don't have a blueprint for how they're, again, going to monetize this, how they're going to make money, and I can tell you from talking to people that are involved with ad sales for Syfy, for example, WWE programming in 2012, Smackdown ad rates aren't looking good. What they're attracting in terms of ad partners, not hot, not good. So that's on Syfy, not a great network but still, Syfy. WWE, its own network, 24 hours of content, whether it's repeats and replays and so on, but still 24 hours a day, what do you think they're going to get? It's gonna be horrible! At the same time they're spending all this money, going deep into their cash reserves to try to enhance their production facilities, to add staffing to be able to facilitate this thing, it's a huge risk.
Bauer's statements are not only daunting and incredibly worrying, but they serve to make WWE management look woefully incompetent and ill-prepared. Or perhaps, as Alvarez has hinted, most folks in WWE know this is a disaster waiting to happen but just don't have the nerve to break it to Vince.
Indeed, you'd be a fool to be in WWE not even mildly concerned about this upcoming network launch. Everything about this
does feel incredibly rushed. Vince and the company's statements about it in general feel
too vague. One gets the strong impression the whole thing is sorely lacking in direction and is fuelled solely by Vince's need to succeed in something outside of WWE (and we all know how well that works out: The XFL, the WBF, WWE Movies, Smackdown Records...need I go on?)
Far from being every wrestling fan's dream, it looks increasingly like the WWE Network will go down faster than the XFL did. Let's hope WWE can prove the critics wrong and the WWE Network does not end up being consigned to the annals of history as one of wrestling's biggest flops.
WWE -PANIC Over the WWE Network Launch
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