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Former TPWW Royalty
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The Sheets:
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Originally Posted by Observer
WWE is set to air its first-ever virtual roundtable on YouTube tomorrow morning.
It was announced today that WWE's virtual roundtable series will kick off with an episode featuring the company's Scottish champions. It will premiere on YouTube at 10 a.m. Eastern time this Thursday (April 30).
WWE Champion Drew McIntyre, Women's Tag Team Champion Nikki Cross, NXT UK Women's Champion Kay Lee Ray, and NXT UK Tag Team Champions Gallus (Mark Coffey & Wolfgang) are taking part in the roundtable. They will "discuss what it means to represent Scotland in both WWE and NXT UK, their personal and often entwined journeys to championship glory and what their concurrent reigns could mean for the future of Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole."
The virtual roundtable will be hosted by NXT UK's Andy Shepherd.
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Link: https://twitter.com/WWEUK/status/1255497014009384965
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Originally Posted by Observer
This weekend's season premiere of Showtime's "Billions" will include an appearance by the Raw Women's Champion.
During this morning's edition of WWE's The Bump, it was confirmed that Lynch will have a role in the drama series' season five premiere. The episode will air on Showtime at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday (May 3).
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Originally Posted by PWI
Major League Wrestling ("MLW") today announced a new distribution partnership with iNDEMAND to distribute a slate of special events starting this May on pay-per-view via iNDEMAND.
"iNDEMAND is a giant in the sports programming space and the perfect partner as the league continues to build its audience and distribution," said MLW CEO Court Bauer.
Major League Wrestling will present three marquee events in the month of May, including:
May 7th: MLW Battle Riot II. More info
May 14th: MLW Saturday Night Super Fight. More info
May 21st: MLW Opera Cup 2019. More info
All events have a start time of 8:00 pm ET. Additional replays will be available all month.
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Originally Posted by Post Wrestling
Television viewership has invariably taken its toll on both WWE and AEW over the past seven weeks of empty arena shows. Raw is hovering at historic lows with this past Monday’s show featuring a third hour that was the least-watched hour in Raw’s modern history.
In studying the live viewership data available for Raw, SmackDown, NXT, and AEW Dynamite, it’s been SmackDown that has held up best until the past two weeks. Over the past seven episodes of SmackDown, the show is only down 5.4% but that has been amplified over the last two weeks where SmackDown has hit its two lowest viewership figures since launching on Fox. If this trend continues, the show will catch up to the loss shown with the other programs.
Over the seven weeks before the empty arena shows, Raw averaged 2,281,000 viewers (2,262,000 if you factor out the night after Royal Rumble) from January 29th until March 9th (which was the final episode in front of fans).
Since the empty arena Raws began on March 16th, they have averaged 1,991,000 viewers, a decline of 13%. The first week inside an empty arena had the novelty factor and was strengthened by the re-airing of the men’s Royal Rumble match and averaged 2.335 million viewers. The decline began the week after and has hovered at the two million viewers, although Raw has fallen under that number the past two episodes.
For SmackDown, they averaged 2,462,000 viewers on Fox from January 31st through March 6th in front of an audience. Over seven empty arena shows, the average is 2,330,000 and falling 5.4%. The past two weeks have shown a great fall with 2.187 and 2.005 million viewers respectively. If they stay at this level of viewership, their percentage drop will fall in line with Raw.
NXT and AEW had the unique circumstance of holding live shows right as the NBA season was being shut down on Wednesday, March 11th along with the news of Rudy Gobert testing positive and U.S. President Donald Trump holding a speech regarding travel restrictions. That night, AEW was hit harder while NXT stayed relatively normal to its typical audience average.
I threw out the March 11th figures for the comparison of both shows.
NXT averaged 745,000 viewers from January 29th until March 4th over six episodes (if you include the March 11th episode their average would only be down by 3,000 viewers). In the six episodes since, they have averaged 642,000 viewers and declined 14%.
AEW averaged 873,000 viewers over their six episodes from January 29th until March 4th. From March 18th until April 22nd, the show has fallen 13% with 758,000 viewers per episode. For the first two empty arena shows, AEW was not hurt at all with its first show doing 932,000 on March 18th and 819,000 on March 25th. The larger drop occurred the next week where it was down to 685,000 viewers.
From this data, it would indicate that wrestling fans have tuned out at a rate of approximately 13%. SmackDown has held up better, but the last two weeks would suggest they will be at the same level of decline as the other shows providing that the 2 million viewership mark is their new normal.
It was reported in the recent issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that DVR viewership is down across the board, as well. Dave Meltzer notes that Raw and SmackDown’s audience typically grew 20% with DVR viewership and has fallen to 16% over the first four weeks since the shutdown. NXT has fallen from 31% to 26% and AEW has dropped from 38% to 32%.
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John Pollock had a very interesting article on the impact empty arena shows have had on wrestling tv ratings.
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Originally Posted by Fightful
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, WWE has been working with a limited roster over the last month and a half. Pete Dunne, one-half of the NXT Tag Team Champions with Matt Riddle, has been noticeably absent from NXT television as he's remained in the UK.
While times are tough and not being able to wrestle isn't easy, Dunne has found a positive to the current situation.
“I think it’s a much-needed break in a way,” Dunne told Alex McCarthy of TalkSPORT. “I think for years and years we talked about maybe, is there a way that wrestling could have a kind-of off-season. I think this is a good trial for that for some of us. To be able to be back in England with my family and being able to train a bit differently to how I would if I was on the road and wrestling all the time. I’m just trying to put a positive spin on something that’s hugely negative [coronavirus/lockdown]. But if I was going to [have an off-season], then spending time with the family, training hard, recouping and then coming back better.”
With Dunne being absent from television, Timothy Thatcher stepped up as Riddle's tag team partner last Wednesday on NXT, helping Riddle defeated The Undisputed Era.
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Originally Posted by Fightful
Ricochet & Cedric Alexander may have only been teaming up on Raw for just a few weeks, but it appears that they already have a name.
Throughout this week, both wrestlers started tagging themselves on Twitter as #2FlyCrew, seemingly indicating that will be their team name, at least for now.
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Link: https://twitter.com/KingRicochet/sta...85738428358656 , https://twitter.com/CedricAlexander/...69350483738624
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