[Mr. Nerfect]

Originally Posted by Simple Fan I highly doubt that, could probably take some talent but like I said Impact has most their key talent locked up for a while. As far as cameramen and stage hands go I'm not sure about any of that but I don't think that'd be something a new company would try to poach, and if it was ROH would be more susceptible to that than Impact. Could hurt both but I don't think it'll put either out of business if they work with other promotions like All In did.

I'm pretty sure that anyone making a serious run could buy TNA from whoever is holding it. They're not doing roaring business. They have low attendance and their ratings are going down. They might have talent locked into contracts, but I was reading somewhere that their video library's worth would be estimated to be at just over $1 million. I don't know how much their talent currently gets paid, but I bet you could buy out most of their contracts for less than another million. You could probably steal TNA entirely for $2 million and a lot of people would probably be happy to have it off their hands.

Keep in mind Shahid Khan was about to spend $800 million on a project. He's obviously not going to sink that much into wrestling, but he could literally buy between 400 and 800 TNAs for fun. If he were so inclined.

Originally Posted by The Midnight Gertner Yes but there's always been a mainstream alternative to those things. Coke always has Pepsi, Apple has Samsung, etc. WWE has been the only game in town going on 18 years now in terms of being mainstream. TNA went on a media blitz trying to get their name out. Nobody cared. People saw it as minor league . Plus wrestling is a very niche product. This new fed will appeal to the All In crowd. That's it. I'm not saying it can't be successful, but it is what it is.

That's all true. No major disagreement here at all. More so than wrestling being niche, wrestling has been looked down upon. I think the big shift is in how much Vince gets for TV. And it doesn't take a whiz to see that his TV is objectively bad and he's a volume business.

TNA had the backing of Spike, and while "nobody cared," it was doing pretty decent numbers until they went and burnt their bridges with Spike. I'm not sure how much money Viacom was pumping into them, but it was probably more than Panda were (although they are much bigger than I initially thought).

You can't do exactly what WCW or TNA did and expect success. You've really got to be smarter about it than that. But I think where you and I differ on this is that I don't take 100% failure rate against Vince so far to mean that it's inevitable you're going to have a 100% failure rate against Vince. Markets change, and he's ballooned to this size where he's locked into this pattern that he can't really break from until he loses deals and what have you.

Completely agree with the audience that are into this. Hell, I'm not really into Cody or The Young Bucks at all, haha. But I think striking the right deal with the right people in the right climate with the right marketing can create something that isn't just looking to repeat history, but rather take that existing audience that is burnt out on bad volume television and give them something boutique to chew on.

Originally Posted by Slik Gertner has a valid point - but we also know nothing about how this will be presented, filmed and so forth. They might have a brand new take on how to present wrestling to the public, Vince (and The Von Erichs) did back in the early 80's. I'm excited to see what happens and look forward to giving it a watch if it does happen.

Gertner's points are very valid, and he turns out to be correct more often than not. Reading up on the specific extent of the trademarks, it seems that a lot is going to be digital or on the internet. That's probably blanket stuff, but they specifically mention internet PPVs and digital distribution of things.

If you're going to just do another ROH or TNA, forget about it. Another drop in the bucket. More saturation, if I'm being honest. But if you're going to give this a real go, then I am optimistically (perhaps not cautiously enough so) that there is a real opening.

Hell, the name Double or Nothing itself implies that they are going to try and get 20,000 people into an arena. Which sounds insane, but something about this project has always felt more ambitious than Wale wanting to start up his own promotion, or Toby Keith wanting to start up his own.

This seems like the sort of thing that you'd only do, and that Cody and The Bucks would only do, if there was serious investment behind it to the point they could sacrifice their New Japan and ROH careers (to a large extent). And I only think a billionaire would get legitimately involved in wrestling because they wanted to increase their fortune, and not just create random content.

I think the money is there in wrestling (look at Vince), but you've got to cross a certain threshold to make it. TV stations want something that can look like what Vince does. You can be polished, but if you are only playing to a few hundred, the you look small time compared to what everyone imagines when they think of wrestling.

Originally Posted by The Midnight Gertner I'm curious to see whether this is actually treated as an alternative. What I mean by that is, I've never met a TNA fan who didn't also watch the WWE. I know a trillion people who only watch the WWE. So it's really not an alternative. It's just additional wrestling that you are watching. I also live in Canada so I probably have a different perspective.

That is a problem. I think people are really ready for there to be competition. More and more I see fatigue and hear about people I thought were hardcore fans not watching anymore. WWE is everyone's gateway into wrestling, and everything else is auxiliary. Even New Japan depends on almost a contrarian position to WWE. It's "Not WWE" to a lot of people. I still haven't taken the dive and subscribed to World yet. I might still, but you need more than goodwill and just being something else on the market that is a babyface underdog that people, for whatever reason, don't actually jump on.

I hear about how there are all these alternatives out there, but truthfully, most of them suck. They aren't what I like in wrestling, and the one I am hopeful for, New Japan, exists in a realm that feels so other to WWE that they don't feel like they really occupy space together. I think what people really want is something with mainstream access that anyone can watch that they can choose over WWE. Who knows if they will?