WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett, who is also All Elite Wrestling’s Director of Business Development, took to an episode of his “My World with Jeff Jarrett” podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including the importance of TNA Wrestling transitioning from standard definition to HD.
Jarrett said, “Okay. From my perspective, I’m going to ask you what time it is. I’m going to tell you how to build a clock on this one. No, the quick version is I was always engaged, even at Channel Five Studios. You know how these three cameras, four cameras, this and that, then you go, I went to Tennessee and Texas, and we’re on ESPN creating that. And it’s kind of the same thing, but it’s just produced differently and all that. But that’s a nationally syndicated show, the ESPN, USWA, Texas shows. Then you move to WWE, and that’s a global show, and that’s a whole different world. Titan Studios and all that. So, all along the way, I got my education, for the most part, on how television is produced and shot and a lifetime of experience. I guess you could say the FCC. They’re the ones. I may be wrong on that, Conrad, but whoever made the decision that all programming has to convert to HD whenever that ruling was an NBC, a CBS, all the networks, or a high-ranking TBS, TNT. You know that those guys, they got the movie the money to convert in its normal course of business. When you get down, Spike is a second-tier network in the Viacom family, but then you get down even lower than that. It was a real issue. I mean, to go back into this era. I mean, it was, like you said, enormously expensive. It was a real process. And so when it came to little old TNA who had been on Spike, not that long scratching and clawing. We understood real quick. We hired an outside firm and our studio and it’s an education process. But Spike leaned into it for us. They helped on certain levels, but we had to redo our studio, a studio that wasn’t that old, but the conversion was very expensive. And it is something that when you go back and see the library today, folks, if you see bars on the sides of any kind of film, that’s standard def yeah, standard def. And so when you had to convert everything, it just changed. It changed everything production-wise. And so I’m glad nowadays I got to walk through that process. You know, that’s where certain guys that are in this business now have the education, the hard knocks education. But also, there’s so much more than just going to the ring and ding ding ding. As a talent, you have to understand production. If you don’t, you’re an incomplete talent. But yeah, Connie is a step forward for us. Spike was very good with us and to us during this time frame because they kind of understood that on their side, ‘We can’t have prime time programming that’s at the top of our food chain in standard def.’ You know, we’ve got to figure this out and figure it out.”
You can check out the complete podcast below.
