wrestling / Columns

The Failed WWE Network UK Launch: How I Learned to Keep Worrying and Fear the Future

November 4, 2014 | Posted by Jack Stevenson
WWE Network WWF Superstars Image Credit: WWE

The WWE Network launched in the UK three hours ago as I write this, finally giving wrestling fans over here access to the unparalleled archive of vintage wrestling programming that we’ve been anticipating for nearly a year. About 15 minutes later it was taken down again without a word of explanation or apology, other than a cursory “thanks for your patience.” But what a 15 minutes it was! After ten months of teasing I was finally permitted to view half an episode of Hardcore TV and now I feel deeply valued as a fan.

WWE has not handled the launch of the Network well. I don’t feel that’s a particularly controversial statement to make. It has particularly not handled the launch of the Network well in the U.K, which is weird since it’s a much larger market for them than, say, Zambia, which does have access to the Network and has done for a while. WWE is coming to Liverpool for next week’s Raw and none of the fans there will be able to watch the Network without a DNS altering program. Raw isn’t scheduled to emanate from Lusaka for a good four months, and they can all enjoy the thousands of hours of footage, unabated by geographical restrictions. By the time I’ve finished writing this and it’s been published on 411, WWE probably will have announced nine separate launch dates for the Network in the U.K, cancelled twelve of them, and confirmed that when it finally does arrive you’ll only be able to view it if you pay £73, plus an extra £15 for the PPVs, and give Rupert Murdoch a lovely foot massage twice a week.

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I recognize that there are complications with launching a project of this size, and I also recognize my ability to comment on important corporate negotiations and deal making is limited at best, being as right now I am subsisting on a student loan from the U.K government, and my job is as an unpaid volunteer at a little independent cinema that closes down roughly four times a year. But I think I’m allowed to venture the suggestion that WWE maybe shouldn’t have again postponed the WWE Network’s UK launch, this time literally minutes before they claimed it would go live, with no indication we might be able to see the darn thing, and as I mentioned, absolutely no apology whatsoever. I mean this in an ethical sense; it’s clearly an unbelievably shoddy way to treat your customers, a lot of people feel hugely disappointed and let down, and who can blame them? It was tolerable to be informed days in advance that we’re going to have to wait one more month for the Network- to be told minutes prior to the scheduled launch that we’re not getting it and we’re not going to find out when we will is just ridiculous. It’s like a father gifting his children an adorable kitten for Christmas, letting them pet it just long enough for love to spread through their child minds and hearts, and then sealing the kitten in a box, hiding it in an unspecified room, and refusing to give any information on whether the kitten even exists. It’s a real pain, sometimes, being Schrödinger’s kids.

In a business sense, however, the repercussions WWE face will be minimal. In postponing again they’ve probably more than likely bought themselves some time to hash out a deal with Sky TV, which will obviously be a huge financial benefit to them long term. Meanwhile, British wrestling fans, including myself, are defiantly proclaiming that we don’t care about their fucking network and we’re sick of being mistreated and we’re mad as hell and not going to take it any more, but, if we’re being honest, most of us will sign up when it finally does arrive on our shores. There is no other comparable on demand wrestling service. Today, guerilla styled Scottish indy promotion ICW launched their ICW on Demand website, which provides top action from arguably the best company in the U.K for a notably cheaper price than the WWE’s alternative. It’s a pretty great deal and I’m quite interested in signing up, even though ICW’s alcohol drenched atmosphere and determinedly adult oriented product isn’t really my thing. It’s not even remotely as good as the Network though. Yes, they delivered it on time and it seems to work with remarkably few teething troubles and everyone on the whole is pleased with it, but in terms of the actual volume and quality of content, it’s not even a competition. The same can be said for ROH or CHIKARA’s equivalent offerings, or the Smart Mark Video on Demand service where you purchase individual shows. The WWE Network offers unbeatable value and will continue to do so unless the price increases to a truly exorbitant level, and there is literally zero prospect of any serious competition being launched for the dedicated wrestling fan unless pretty much all the major independent promotions make their entire back catalogues available on one on demand service for a substantially cheaper price. Which isn’t going to happen, obviously.

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This leads me on to the wider point I want to make, which I hope will rescue this article somewhat from just being a load of self-indulgent whining that I DIDN’T GET MY DAMN NETWORK EVEN THOUGH THEY PROMISED IT ME NOOOOOOOOOOOOW! That point goes a-little something like this; we are all hopelessly in thrall to WWE. We’re all aware of this, and we lament the lack of competition, and pine for the days of the Monday Night War when if Raw was no good we could switch to Nitro and vice versa, but I don’t think we realize how genuinely fucked we are. WWE have a complete monopoly on the Western wrestling market. The chances of that changing any time soon is utterly non-existent. There is no company with the potential to mount a serious challenge, nor is there a wealthy businessman idiotic enough to sink enough of their fortune into a deeply unattractive product to force even a footnote in the history books. I really cannot underline this enough- we’re Homer, yeah, and Mr. Burns is standing over us with his “don’t forget; you’re here forever” plaque (‘here forever’ referring to being stuck in the tedious status quo of pro wrestling where Raw is mediocre every week and everyone complains about it on the internet and nothing ever changes,) and all we can do is stick pictures of whoever your own personal Maggie is on the sign in an attempt to make this whole desperate situation seem more palatable. Because, make no mistake about it, this is a desperate situation. WWE has no motivation to change- they’re rich as heck and the fact they’ve been making a loss recently has nothing to do with the shallow, unsatisfactory nature of the product. TNA lurches around, bravely refusing to die and occasionally stringing together a few damn fine episodes of Impact, but it’s giving its own performers far more sleepless nights than it is Vince McMahon. Smaller promotions at least have an obligation to put on a product that is satisfying enough to stop them from dying, but there are no great minds left there and increasingly few great wrestlers. The sheer number of competitors floating around the scene mean there will always be worthwhile matches and moments going on (I’ve been really enjoying the gritty mat stylings of Drew Gulak, Biff Busick and Timothy Thatcher this year) but you have to work increasingly hard to find them. Even if a punky little indie promotion pairs a talented roster with an inventive booker and goes on a run of super great shows, their roster will be asset stripped far quicker than it can be replenished. The only thing saving us all from complete despair is that it’s hard to imagine this lamentable state of the quasi-sport continuing for year after year after year, but all available evidence at the moment suggests it will.

In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama posited in his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ that, with the Cold War over, communism widely discredited and Western liberal democracy almost all pervasive, that we really had reached ‘the end of history,’ that our political systems couldn’t evolve any further. Wrestling is experiencing the same thing, and it absolutely sucks. We’re at the end of history. Evolution isn’t going to happen because there’s no room for it to. How can it? Take the promotion Evolve- how is that going to Evolve? What is going to change in Evolve’s circumstances that will take it to the next level? Is Gabe Sapolsky going to magically remember how to book a satisfying wrestling show again, and is everyone going to pay significantly more attention than they did during his wonderful stint writing Ring of Honor from 2004 to 2006? Are they going to find a new mine of incredible wrestling talent that inexplicably have no interest in WWE? Is someone going to win the lottery and invest all the winnings in the promotion so they can improve their production values and sign better talent and push for national recognition? And if any of these things are in any way likely, why have none of them come even remotely close to occurring since the heyday of ECW? At least ECW had the advantage of existing in an anarchic wrestling market where there was no unchallenged number one and a wealth of untapped talent pools- that’s simply not the case any more. It’s not just the evolution of promotions that is over- in terms of the way matches are put together, we’ve reached a conclusion as well. No wrestling move has been invented since the Go 2 Sleep that is both original and not hugely convoluted. Look at the winners of the Wrestling Observer’s Move of the Year award since KENTA last took it in 2007- the Shooting Star Press won one, a move that’s been around for well over a decade, Ricochet’s Double Rotation Moonsault took two, which is a gymnastic feat few can replicate and that realistically cannot be improved on. The Young Bucks’ More Bang for Your Buck won in 2009, which consists of already popular flying moves strung together into a finishing sequence, and for the last two years it’s been the Rainmaker, which is a Lariat. There are no new moves left to be invented that actually would work well enough to be used in a wide variety of matches. I’d be delighted to be proved wrong, but surprised as well. There is no way for any promotion or match to reach a higher level, and that puts limits on the wrestlers as well- I still think there are grapplers out there who will be able to bring new little tricks and stylistic tics to the ring to make them original, but they’re going to be few and far between.

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Returning to the general malaise of WWE’s product briefly, the clearest way to send a message that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way they approach putting on a wrestling show would be a sustained and well-organized fan boycott, but again, that’s a pipe dream. There is no universally recognized fan figurehead who is intelligent and charismatic enough to unite a dispersed fanbase like pro wrestling’s, especially since a vocal minority of frustrated grapple fans will loudly tell you they won’t be satisfied with anything less than Triple H blasting himself in the face with a shotgun live on air. Even if there was, as a collective we’ve been conditioned for so long to believe that we can’t affect what we see on our screens, beyond superficial WWE apps votes, that no one would truly be convinced that any kind of protest would work. And, at heart, we all fucking adore wrestling, and WWE is the most accessible source of it for us, and the vast majority of us grew up on it and have never truly kicked it out of our lives, so we wouldn’t want to stop watching for too long. We just accept that it it’s not as good as we used to be, and try enjoy the fleeting moments where it quietly promises it could still be, if everyone would just get their act together. That’s another barrier in the way of evolution then- no prospect of coherent, prolonged fan dissent means that WWE has no motivation to evolve, it can rely on receiving enough of our money no matter what happens on Raw.

WWE has devolved over the past decade and a bit into this bland, frustrating product that is completely dominant and can crush any competition with a flick of its finger, and there is no feasible way of challenging it. I really truly believe that bringing in Fukuyama wasn’t just me being pretentious; we really are at ‘the end of history.’ So, what I’m trying to say is, build a bomb shelter designed to weather the ‘rasslepocalypse, because tomorrow WWE could announce that it’s shutting down the WWE Network across the whole world, forever, and is changing Raw into a three hour orgy of John Cena and Randy Orton matches, or just a three hour John Cena and Randy Orton orgy. And there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re pathetic and insignificant and small.

article topics :

WWE, WWE Network, Jack Stevenson