Details Behind WWE’s Deal With ESPN Starting Early, Peacock, More
WWE WrestlePalooza is official for September 20 in Indianapolis, but some of the bigger news surrounds the show.
ESPN and WWE provided Fightful and other outlets a press release revealing that not only would the WrestlePalooza show happen, but it would happen on ESPN. Furthermore, the ESPN DTC service will be launching on August 21, and will be airing the main roster WWE PLEs from September 20 forward. This is much earlier than the anticipated date of March, when the Peacock deal ends.
The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Peacock had to give the “okay” for this to happen. A deal was brokered between WWE and Peacock and brought to ESPN, which is owned by Disney. A source in WWE tells Fightful Select that WWE looks forward to the NBCU/Peacock relationship continuing, and that NXT PLE events are still on Peacock for the time being.
The THR reports indicated that WWE’s view was that multi-night PLE events helped fulfill the dates on the Peacock deal early, and there will be more main roster content headed to Peacock that has yet to be announced.
Last week, WWE sources told us that the WWE Library was expected to be migrated to Youtube, but with this new deal, those same sources said they believe there’s a good chance it could remain on Peacock for a while. We’re working for additional details on that. Those that we spoke to in WWE say that a part of WWE’s approach is to have content on as many platforms as possible to grab fans of each of those platforms.
It was important to note that ESPN had stressed that many “traditional” cable services would be able to bundle ESPN’s DTC service with their cable subscription. There will be a number of services that are left out on this, and is being used to help push Hulu, and traditional cable services. Right now, Youtube TV is not included, but ESPN sources tell us they believe that they are optimistic that a deal will be reached by WrestleMania.
There are some that have been bringing up F1rst Wrestling owning the WrestlePalooza trademark. However, both Fightful and Bodyslam.net have been told by someone close to the company that a memo was sent out last week saying “As of Monday(8/11), we are FULL STOP on all things WRESTLEPALOOZA,” indicating that there was movement there. Bodyslam also reported this info this afternoon.
We have reached out to WWE and ESPN for additional details.
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