WWE President Nick Khan discussed the possibility of WWE returning to a traditional PPV format following Endeavor’s acquisition of the company on LightShed Live.
Khan said, “There could be, but when Vince and company got out of the traditional pay-per-view business, think about this, the first person to take events out of closed circuit and onto traditional pay-per-view was Vince McMahon. The first person to take it off traditional pay-per-view and put it on an OTT platform, Vince McMahon. Again, the first person to take his programming off his own OTT platform and take it to a streaming service, Vince McMahon. In 2014 when WWE Network launched, you only had to be the third-best OTT service next to Netflix and Hulu. Once the streaming wars started, Vince McMahon took them off.
He has been able to see around the corners on this stuff, so for us, we didn’t like traditional pay-per-view because fifty percent of the dollars go to direct just for plugging in, which is absurd. So, getting out of that and going direct to consumer got around that. You see even with the UFC ESPN+ deal, there’s no demand direct, so might we consider going back to digital pay-per-views, if it was available for our fans and priced right, of course we’d consider it. We’re open for business. A fifty percent model where half goes to the plug-in is not gonna happen.”
