Details on WWE’s Relationship With Peacock, Fox Relationship Throwing MLW’s Tubi Plans in Doubt

A new report has details on WWE’s relationship with Peacock and how the company’s deal with FOX appears to have thrown a potential MLW/Tubi deal into doubt. Fightful Select has a report that follows up on their recent reports on WWE’s terrestrial TV partnerships with USA Network and FOX, with the new report examining how WWE is navigating the streaming market.

Similarly to the previous reports, this new report comes from several sources between WWE, FOX, and Peacock, and it makes clear that the sources don’t represent Fox, NBC Universal, Peacock, Tubi, The USA Network or WWE as a whole.

According to the report, a source “of influence” within WWE made note of how FOX could have bid for WWE’s PPVs to put them on Tubi, the streaming platform that FOX owns. Sources at FOX said that while there were some in the company that likely had frustration about promoting Peacock on their network as part of Smackdown broadcasts and otherwise, they have been happy to help promote major shows on their platforms and said that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Regarding Peacock, one person spoke with Fightful and said that WWE’s performance there has been “exceptional” and that more people have been viewing WWE PPVs than have ever before. It was noted that the relationship between WWE and Peacock seems good, even with hefty criticism from within WWE about Peacock being less user-friendly than the WWE Network. There had been a lot of resources put into hiring staff to optimize the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for the Network, but the policies would change by the day and that it still was not fully optimized by the time it was sunsetting in the US. The report also cites Mat Men’s Andrew Zarian in saying that Peacock did not permit FOX or USA Network’s social media to post videos from SummerSlam which is why there were only GIFs posted on the day of the show.

One thing to note in the report is that while there is no streaming deal between WWE and FOX/Tubi, the relationship between WWE and FOX has thrown a monkeywrench into plans for another wrestling company that Fightful has identified as MLW. MLW agreed to a deal with Tubi that was set to be announced in August, but shortly before that announcement WWE was made aware of it. A source close to FOX notes that WWE did not respond favorably to that deal and as a result, its future is in question. MLW and WWE did not respond to requests from the site for comment, and FOX declined to do so.