Over the past forty-some years, WWE has been a fixture on broadcast television. Now, the company is looking into the future on where Raw and Smackdown will be shown next.

On Tuesday morning, WWE hosted its latest quarterly earnings presentation hosted by Stephanie McMahon, Nick Khan, Paul “Triple H” Levesque and Frank Riddick. The presentation had McMahon celebrating the improved viewership for the past quarter’s premium live events compared to the previous year, as well as the improved viewership for Monday Night Raw.

Khan then brought up the upcoming television rights renewals for both Raw and SmackDown, currently on NBCUniversal and FOX respectively until 2024. Khan claimed that the group of possible bidders for the two shows has grown and brought up Netflix as a potential bidder.

“On Netflix, we’ve been saying on these calls for many months that we believe Netflix is looking to enter the live space. We got confirmation of that this past quarter when Netflix made a bid for the rights for Formula 1. We believe Netflix’s appetite for live (programming) will only increase after the introduction of their ad tier. As we all know, the strongest CPMs are those sold against live programming.”

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Khan stated that future bids for live programming being made by Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) and Apple over the past year. He also speculated that NFL Sunday Ticket will be heading to a streaming service. Thirsty will monitor the rights for Raw and Smackdown closely.

What’s your opinion on this one? Let us know in the comments!

Andre Porter

Andre is a news writer at Ringside News and Thirsty For News, covering professional wrestling since 1999. He is an avid fan of the WWE and has attended numerous television tapings and PPVs. With a background in multimedia, Andre also enjoys film, travel, comics, and rooting for Philadelphia sports teams.

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