WWE and Netflix are entering a brand new era.
Starting in January, the streaming platform will be the exclusive home of Monday Night Raw in the US, Canada and the UK, among others.
The deal you have to take The flagship program, which will air on linear television for the first time since its premiere more than 30 years ago, is said to be worth $5 billion.
With so much money at stake, wrestling fans were naturally curious about what was to come.
And while WWE manager Nick Khan confirmed the programming style won't change in the future, there's a lot of hype leading up to the move.
Both sides will want to put their best foot forward for Raw's debut on Netflix, and for WWE that means promoting their top talent to the show.
The premiere episode will feature some of the company's biggest names, including , , , and Bianca Belair.
WWE has also promised “surprise guests” in addition to these stars.
It looks like Raw will debut on Netflix to much fanfare, and ahead of next month's show, Khan confirmed that records are already being broken.
He revealed that interest in the January 6 premiere – which will air at the Intuit Dome in California – was so great that it had “already broken WWE's record for arena tickets in the United States.”
“That will be in six weeks and it is far from sold out,” Khan added.
“What are the components for this? It's Netflix. People are excited about this show.”
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Clearly, WWE fans are excited about the future.
However, there is a possibility of technical difficulties – like those that occurred during the Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fight in November – were a cause for concern for some.
Before launch, Netflix addressed these concerns.
“Whenever we host live events, we obviously want it to be seamless for each and every one of our members,” Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria said this week, before noting that Christmas Day NFL games will be the next big test .
“To put it in perspective, there were 65 million concurrent streamers. The scale was very large, which is great.
“There was a lot of interest in it. When you test something and get it to 65 million.” [streams] At the same time… you can't learn these things until you do them.
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“So they took a big swing, and our teams and our engineers reacted super quickly, stabilized it, and a lot of the members got it up and running again pretty quickly.”
“We learned from those things, and obviously we all did a lot to learn and prepare for the NFL. We are absolutely ready and excited for WWE.”
