On Thursday, WWE announced that they had signed a $5 billion deal with Netflix to stream Monday Night RAW. Netflix will be the home for WWE RAW for the next ten years. However, Netflix has the option to opt out after five years. They also have a chance to extend the deal for another decade after an initial five years.
Netflix will stream RAW in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Latin America. WWE’s other shows will also stream on the platform for fans outside of the US from 2025 onwards. In addition, all the WWE classic content will be available for fans around the world, except the United States, starting next year.
In an interview with Stratechery, Greg Peters, the Chief Executive Officer of Netflix, talked about the WWE RAW deal.
“We love this deal for a whole variety of reasons. One is that the one you mentioned, which we think, this is quite close to what we do. We think we are in the business of telling dramatic stories around sports. You’ve seen it with Drive to Survive or Break Point, Full Swing. We feel that’s a space that we’ve earned the right to play and an expectation to deliver value to consumers, and we feel like this is in that zone. We also love it, because as you mentioned, this is 52 weeks of entertainment. This is always on entertainment, and sports entertainment, and it fits really well within our model. We think it’s synergistic with what we’re doing on ads, and we like it from that perspective.”
Greg Peters believes Netflix can grow the WWE fan base with this deal.
“What we believe is that there’s a real opportunity for growing the fan base for this set of content globally. We think it’s been under-distributed, we think it’s been under-leveraged. There’s good signs that there’s fans out there, but we think we can grow that. We think about it as the inverse to Drive to Survive to F1. We could actually grow the international audience in a way that is material. We’ve organized the deal so that it’s a big long-term deal. In other words, there’s a little bit of risk insulation in the renting concerns that you mentioned before.”
WWE NETWORK TO SHUT DOWN IN 2025