View Single Post
Old 09-27-2019, 09:53 PM   #988
Emperor Smeat
Former TPWW Royalty
 
Emperor Smeat's Avatar
 
Posts: 66,588
Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)Emperor Smeat makes a lot of good posts (200,000+)
The Sheets:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer
The promotional push for SmackDown's move to FOX will include WWE personalities appearing on FOX News' "FOX & Friends" next week.

Kofi Kingston will be on the morning show on Monday (September 30), Stephanie McMahon will appear on Tuesday (October 1), Charlotte Flair will appear on Wednesday (October 2), and Roman Reigns will be on the show on Thursday (October 3).

The segments will begin at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. There will then be a meet-and-greet with that day's guest at 9:15 a.m. Eastern. WWE noted that the meet-and-greets are only for the first 150 fans and will be weather permitting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer
WWE's return to Saudi Arabia is set for Halloween.

WWE's Arabic website announced today that Crown Jewel 2019 will take place at King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Thursday, October 31. Tickets will go on sale on Monday (September 30) at 6 p.m. local time ...

With SmackDown moving to Friday nights on FOX, SmackDown will take place the day after Crown Jewel.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PWI
Over the last several days, WWE has been teasing a series titled "The Bump" on social media ...

PWInsider.com is told that The Bump will be a morning talk-show style series that will debut on Wednesday morning 10/2 featuring discussion of WWE-centric topics. We were told the idea for the show is to be a light and fun talk show mixed with ESPN Sportscenter style discussion.

The series will stream on WWE social media channels. We have not heard if it will be airing on the WWE Network.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PWI
Jerry Lawler spoke with The Memphis Commercial Appeal about returning to the Raw commentary booth. On how the conversation went, Lawler noted, "I got a call about it Tuesday morning from Kevin Dunn (WWE's executive vice president of television production)," Lawler said. "He said, 'I've got a proposition for you. It may be good news, and it may be bad news.' He knows I don't like to travel a whole lot anymore, so that was the bad part. I said, 'What's the good part?' He said, 'We want you back on Raw. He told me it's for however long I want to do it, so that sealed the deal."

The WWE Hall of Famer stated that the original plan was to have a two-man booth, "It was (Raw's executive director) Paul (Heyman's) idea to put Vic and Dio on Raw," Lawler said. "Apparently, what I was told, Vince (McMahon) said, 'You can't throw these two new, young guys on our flagship show. Call King.' That's how it happened."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
Neither NXT or AEW will air live in the U.K. NXT won’t be on television, limited to the next day airing on the WWE Network. Even though it will air on the WWE Network first in full form, NXT will air in Canada at 7 p.m. on Fridays, edited to one hour. AEW is very close to a Canadian deal, and given the word being out that the FITE stream won’t be available in Canada, that tells you that the hope and talks include going live. At this point main components of the Canadian deal are either done or close to it, and it’s at the Turner side’s level of the finishing touches.

For AEW, the U.K. deal was the subject of a ton of talk in recent days. ITV announced its deal with AEW on 9/25. The announcement was not scheduled and what happened is one person in ITV programming released the news on Twitter before either ITV or AEW had approved it, leaving people scrambling ...

Negotiations were still going on at the time for a first airing, on Thursday or Friday, with Friday being the day at one point, once the idea of going live fell through recently. The announcements weren’t supposed to be made until that was all finalized, which, at press time, it is still has not been.

What killed the live airing were problems between TNT and ITV 4 regarding commercial breaks that couldn’t be rectified. In the U.K., OFCOM, which regulates over-the-air television (as opposed to Sky and BT, which WWE airs on), mandates no more than 12 commercial minutes per show. TNT will have 15 or 16 minutes, and there are ways you think you can work through it by having one break per hour that is taken on TNT but not ITV 4, but that didn’t work out because they each had certain specifications on timing of breaks during the hours that couldn’t be worked out.

It would not have been impossible, but would have been difficult and ITV 4 decided they couldn’t do it live. There are ways around it with having dark breaks but ITV 4 didn’t want to do it and they aren’t doing it with any other shows and it was not something they wanted ...

But after a lot of negative reaction ITV 4 got, there is talk about debuting the show in a time slot closer to Wednesday or some kind of an earlier OnDemand solution. There will be availability live on FITE TV in countries that don’t get the show live, which would be priced at $4.99 per month or $2.99 per single episode. It is notable that besides Canada, FITE is not taking orders from Germany either, although it has not announced that. That would at least hint strongly of negotiations going on for television in Germany, and there are also talks in Australia, as well as one or two other countries that are coming down to the wire ...

At this point, with just days to go, nothing has been announced for Canada. The word is that Canada is also close at this point with sources close to the TSN side, the station rumored to be in he lead for the show for some time, saying the deal isn’t completed. The only thing that is confirmed is that a Canadian deal was in its final stages in the past few days. As noted before, Khan has been working on the deals himself rather than outsourcing to an agency like WWE does with CAA and previously did with Endeavor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
In cost per point of demo ratings, these were the numbers FOX was charging for some different shows, Masked Singer was $2,500; Simpsons was $2,300; Empire was $2,250; Prodigal Son was $1,925 and Smackdown was $1,100. So the value for selling advertising is about half of a regular TV show, if the ratings of the two shows are identical. That’s actually an improvement for wrestling but it still means for ad value Smackdown really has to double the audience in the desired demos of other programming to be an advertising success. While USA Network was able to make money last year based on what it was getting in ad revenue for Raw and Smackdown vs. what it paid, with the higher rights fees, both USA and FOX will not come close to recouping their rights fees with ad sales on the shows.

Within television, the belief is that Smackdown will average a 1.0 in the 18-49 demo, up from the 0.6 to 0.7 range it does now on USA, and the 0.8 FOX did this past season during the 8-10 p.m. Friday time slot. While not exact, that would figure to be 3.1 million viewers on average. But as these show, even if it beats last year’s 0.8, for it to be as valuable, it would have to average closer to a 1.6 in that demo, a figure that it is almost impossible for it to do, because to do so it would probably need to hit five million viewers on average and that is out of the range of possibility.

An 0.6 would be considered a failure. While a demo increase and audience increase doesn’t have to be the same thing, the expectations of a 35 percent increase sounds lofty. The first week and second week, the all the promotion in week one and the draft in week two, should beat that figure. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. The key is more the value of just being on FOX, because the increase in available homes and the decrease in audience by being on Fridays basically evens both out. So anything above 2.1 million or 2.3 million is the actual value of FOX over USA ..

Winter expects Smackdown to dominate the night in 18-49s. They also talked about reducing commercials in the show by 10 to 20 percent as a way to keep the younger audience from drifting away. But doing that will only raise the losses FOX takes because last year’s Smackdown did about $72 million in ad sales and the cost of Smackdown for FOX is $205 million, a large disparity. Even though FOX will likely get that ad sales number up somewhat, it’ll never come close to be able to make up that deficit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
There are a lot of issues going on in CMLL after the death of Paco Alonso. Sofia Alonso is in control by title and has power, but her uncle, Chavo Lutteroth, who ran the promotion before Paco Alonso, is the one making all the financial decisions. Among the moves are increasing the cut the promotion gets and increasing their prices to American promoters. Another change is that the guarantees that many of the top stars are on have been cut greatly. We’re told the legends like Atlantis, Blue Panther and Negro Casas weren’t cut but many of the current biggest younger stars including Dragon Lee were

Lee was also pulled from at least three shows this week, including the Anniversary show, this coming week and the 9/24 Arena Mexico show ... While nobody has said why, the belief was that he worked BOLA, when CMLL told both he and Cavernario that they couldn’t do the show and he didn’t listen. We’ll see how this plays out because there was certainly talk over the weekend that all the things that have happened could get him to leave.

But the question is that if he does leave, how does that affect New Japan, which is a spot he doesn’t want to lose. The belief is that a guy like him can make as much money outside CMLL in Mexico, and more in the U.S. without the hindrances of CMLL. Plus, one would think every promotion in the U.S. would want him since he’s a genuine special talent with charisma. But no television promotion aside from ROH wants to use CMLL guys because MLW was burned by the guys then going to ROH, while AEW and Impact work with AAA and WWE has no deal with CMLL
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
There was a lot of frustration regarding the New York show with the card having to change so often due to all the visas not coming in. This led to them using so many Americans and having to rely on AAA guys who were with Lucha Underground. The belief is all the visas will be in for Los Angeles on 10/23, but we don’t have that confirmed that they are in. That’s probably why no card has been announced but the idea is for it to be a loaded show ...

An interesting note is that a reason it did so terribly is that nobody knew. While these numbers being so small as estimates are tough to pin down, what we do know is that buys now look to be between 300 and 400, but almost none were live, like estimated at around 60. So of the very few people who bought the PPV, it appears most likely had no idea it was even on, then heard after the fact or perhaps saw favorable reviews and then bought it. With such a small number, that actually makes sense. ...

There’s also no word right now on how the 10/13 show in Los Angeles will be broadcast, or if

Well, we now know why there was an El Rey Network mention on the screen throughout the New York show. El Rey will be airing that show on 10/6 at 9 p.m. Eastern
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
Regarding the name AEW Dynamite, like the original Tuesday Night Dynamite, in a trivia note, Khan as a kid used to book pro wrestling television and the name Dynamite was the name of his fantasy television show he put together so that’s the actual origination of the name
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
The updated All Out television PPV number is just over 29,000, which is down from about 39,000 for the last show.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
One thing we’ve seen a lot of is WWE trying to close the holes that AEW can exploit going forward. The making NXT a very heavy wrestling product built around producing hot in-ring was to close the hole that AEW could have exploited since neither Raw nor Smackdown will likely go that direction. WWE is also going to bring back pyro to television. I mean, they’re getting so much money there’s no reason not to, because it’s again a little thing that fans like that AEW was expected to have, since they did with PPVs. WWE dropped it feeling it was an unnecessary cost and made no real difference when it came to ratings, but economics aren’t nearly as tight as they were when that decision was made
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
The reason Lana hasn’t been around with Rusev is because they’ve got other ideas for Lana’s character and not like they don’t want to use her or anything like that
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
Regarding NXT, there were some noting that raises have not come yet for talent since the TV deal started. There are guys who know that the company got a $30 million a year deal from USA and NXT talent is being told they are a third brand, but most of the talent is earning less than $100,000 per year, if not all but a few. The talent is also required to do a full rehearsal every Tuesday night at Full Sail for the Wednesday television. This will happen weekly and it’s mandatory, even for those with a decent amount of television experience ...

A lot of the regular fans were unhappy bout a few things. One was that during the live hour, when they did a commercial break, the action would slow down. It was noted to me by several people at Full Sail who were also at PWG, that the women’s match and Roderick Strong vs Velveteen Dream came across much better on television because the action was chinlocks and nobody did anything much for 4:00 during breaks. The women’s match, which came across as an easy **** match on television, was actually 6:00 of super action and four minutes of not so much. Strong vs. Dream also had a lot of non-action during breaks.

There’s also less fan interaction with talent. The die-hard fans were such because they got to know the talent personally and wanted to help them get over. They would hang out with them before the show at the food trucks. They’d go out after the show to the Ale House. There were no food trucks at the first taping, although it was a positive for talent as they had the WWE catering. Nobody went to the Ale House after ...

The talent used to park in the Full Sail parking lot and hang out with fans, and go in through the front entrance and leave through the front door and talk with fans and take pictures with them. This was changed to them parking in the back and it was impossible for any interaction at the first tapings. The tradition of the talent and fans ordering dinner together before the show was gone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Observer Newsletter
While The Revival’s contracts are up in April, WWE has extended Daniel Wheeler’s (Dash Wilder) deal another ten weeks due to the period he was out of action in 2016 with a broken jaw.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fightful
The greatest duo in history reunites at Starrcast IV.

Starrcast made some major talent announcements, beginning with Sting returning to Baltimore, the site of his first WCW World Championship victory. Sting will be decked out in the red, white, and blue facepaint and jacket, and carrying the WCW World Championship for photo opportunities with fans.

But the bigger announcement is that, for the first time ever, RoboCop will be coming to Starrcast.

Fans may remember RoboCop appearing at WCW Capital Combat 1990 to help Sting fend off the Horsemen. You can view RoboCop's WCW appearance in the video above.

TPWW Frontpage:
Emperor Smeat is offline   Reply With Quote