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Sanguinia posted:Are those getting added episodically? Because I know they have a few full episodes of Raw and Smackdown, but they seem to be limited to randomly selected Greatest Hits like John Cena/Batistas first matches at the start of Ruthless Aggression and Steph and Triple H's vegas wedding. Yeah the RAWs from 1993 are getting added in order. They've got the first 38 hour-long episodes up right now. This encompasses the entire Rob Bartlett era, so enjoy that!!!
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Apr 8, 2014 20:15
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Sanguinia posted:Are those getting added episodically? Because I know they have a few full episodes of Raw and Smackdown, but they seem to be limited to randomly selected Greatest Hits like John Cena/Batistas first matches at the start of Ruthless Aggression and Steph and Triple H's vegas wedding. They're doing the occasional important random Raw or Smackdown but for Raw at least, they're adding 4-5 a week in sequential order. I believe they're up to #38 now on Raw.
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Apr 8, 2014 20:16
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I Feast On Dogshit posted:But they literally couldn't justify a 50% increase. But they literally could if research was done that justifies it. That's the point. The belief by most is that a highly significant number of the 667k current subscribers are people who would likely pay 50% more for a service that offers all of what is offered now. Again, if they feel that most Network subscribers are people who were already spending at least $180 annually on PPVs (let's face it, this is extremely likely), then those people are likely to maintain the subscription even if the price is raised. (for reference, $180 is the same as the cost of purchasing just Rumble, Mania and Summerslam in HD)
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Apr 8, 2014 20:19
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:WWE should take their biggest selling point off the network (that in fact provides almost all of the real value) and then charge more money for it. You're exactly right. It's competing against piracy and YouTube. Make the product so cheap that nobody can justify watching a lovely quality stream when they could spend $10 and watch it live in HD. It's how Netflix operates. Netflix goes onto Torrent sites, sees what is most popular, and tries to acquire that content. I've bought only one WWE PPV in my life, but I've watched pretty much every PPV since about 1997 in one way or another without paying for it. If the price drastically increases, or they take shows off the Network, I will gladly go back to watching like I always have. The Network also goes much farther than pure revenue. If you they 185K domestic SummerSlam buys last year, now they are going to have at least 650K viewers this year. That's another half million more people watching the PPV, becoming more plugged in with the product. More likely to watch Raw, more likely to go to a live event, more likely to buy a T-Shirt.
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Apr 8, 2014 20:49
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No way are they raising the price anytime soon. They are already locking people in long term. I worked for a company with a SaaS platform, and the goal was always to lock people up as long as possible. Lower the price, add more incentives, give first month free, whatever it took to get a long term commitment. With that long term commitment, you actually knew what type of money you were bringing in, and how to adjust future business expenses. It so much safer and more profitable to run a business with that strategy. If anything, they are going to keep finding ways to add value to this service to get more people signing up. I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing things like price drops if you sign up for 1-2 years. I know I'd sign up for a year right now if they gave me a dollar off each month. Maybe, and that's a big maybe, they would increase the price if you only wanted to do month to month, but it's always so much better to get someone to sign up for 2 months for $20 instead of 1 month for $15. Give Vince some credit, he's a fantastic businessman. Already the WWE Network has garnered great word of mouth, getting articles on major sites about what a great value it is. He's looking to ensure the long term growth and safety of the WWE, and the network is the vehicle to do that. Raw and Smackdown on regular cable TV give him all the free advertisement he needs to keep driving home how you need to subscribe to the WWE Network if you are a fan of the WWE. Positive word of mouth will continue to spread. No major streaming problems occurred during Wrestlemania, and that's a huge win. Videogames botch that all the time with server issues on launch. I think there will be a lot of growth on subscriptions over the next few months, and 600,000+ subscriptions is a great start. Edit: ^^^He has exactly the right idea. So many more eyes on every show now. That is what's best for business.
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Apr 8, 2014 20:49
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I Feast On Dogshit posted:Why do people keep saying $15 dollars is fine? Do people honestly think that customers would just accept a 50% price increase inside the first year? Not even netflix have those size of balls. Goons are a strange people who often don't value money for some reason. See: MMO HMO and the prevalence of "Well it looks like it'll suck but I'm preordering it anyway" If they drop their PPVs, I'd probably going to drop the Network. As nice as everything that's on it is, I could get most of it from Dailymotion or whatever, including new PPVs if I were so inclined. I'd imagine that most internet-savvy fans know this as well.
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Apr 8, 2014 21:04
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I hope they keep the price the same but remove everything except a video of Cole saying "Thanks".
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Apr 8, 2014 21:09
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elf help book posted:I hope they keep the price the same but remove everything except a video of Cole saying "Thanks". Contingency plan should all else fail. Make it Heel Cole 
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Apr 8, 2014 21:13
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Astro7x posted:You're exactly right. It's competing against piracy and YouTube. Make the product so cheap that nobody can justify watching a lovely quality stream when they could spend $10 and watch it live in HD. It's how Netflix operates. Netflix goes onto Torrent sites, sees what is most popular, and tries to acquire that content. Just because 650,000 people subscribe to something doesn't mean they will all watch it. Extreme Rules won't get close to the number of eyes on it that Wrestlemania did, and Summerslam while it will get more than a B show won't get the number Wrestlemania did. It will get more viewers than Summerslam did last year, that's for sure. But it won't get close to all of them. Not everyone who subscribes to HBO and Showtime for boxing watches every fight on there, and weaker Strikeforce cards on Showtime would do small fractions of what the big cards would do. I remember the Fedor vs Werdum fight did something like three times the viewership of a card they ran during E3 two weeks prior and substantially better than the Overeem vs Rogers card in the same time period. People will pay for stuff and just not watch the things they have less interest in.
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Apr 8, 2014 21:24
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sportsgenius86 posted:But they literally could if research was done that justifies it. That's the point. You are an absolute fool and I hope that business is not your career path.
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Apr 8, 2014 21:25
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I Feast On Dogshit posted:You are an absolute fool and I hope that business is not your career path. I mean that's pretty much Wrestling Business Expert Dave Meltzer's take on it.
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Apr 8, 2014 21:59
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I Feast On Dogshit posted:You are an absolute fool and I hope that business is not your career path. so you're saying there's no way they could get away with raising the price 50% if they did legitimate market research which indicated they could get away with raising the price 50%?
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Apr 8, 2014 22:00
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MassRafTer posted:Just because 650,000 people subscribe to something doesn't mean they will all watch it. Extreme Rules won't get close to the number of eyes on it that Wrestlemania did, and Summerslam while it will get more than a B show won't get the number Wrestlemania did. It will get more viewers than Summerslam did last year, that's for sure. But it won't get close to all of them. Not everyone who subscribes to HBO and Showtime for boxing watches every fight on there, and weaker Strikeforce cards on Showtime would do small fractions of what the big cards would do. I remember the Fedor vs Werdum fight did something like three times the viewership of a card they ran during E3 two weeks prior and substantially better than the Overeem vs Rogers card in the same time period. People will pay for stuff and just not watch the things they have less interest in. This is not HBO or Showtime though. I can subscribe to Showtime primarily for movies and original Dramas, but check out the big fights because I have access to it and its on. I can also subscribe to Showtime for 1 month at a time for a big fight and then cancel it. If you are subscribing to the network, the primary selling point is live PPVs of the current product. If someone is subscribing for 6 months for $60 and have no interest in the B Shows, why didn't they just drop $60 on Wrestlemania itself and be done with it?
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Apr 8, 2014 22:01
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Astro7x posted:This is not HBO or Showtime though. I can subscribe to Showtime primarily for movies and original Dramas, but check out the big fights because I have access to it and its on. I can also subscribe to Showtime for 1 month at a time for a big fight and then cancel it. Because why do that when you could drop the same amount for that same thing plus six-months access to a vast library of content plus five more PPVs that you don't have to watch but maybe could if you felt like it?
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Apr 8, 2014 22:02
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I tend to agree with Dave on a lot of things but not that. Mostly because Dave doesn't seem to understand what enemy the WWE is fighting, and it isn't PPV or television or another wrestling company. This is as dumb as the suggestion of "Oh they'll stop airing Wrestlemania on the Network."
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Apr 8, 2014 22:03
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epitasis posted:I mean that's pretty much Wrestling Business Expert Dave Meltzer's take on it. What I took from the discussion was more that they could have charged $15 in the first place, not that they should move the price up for the next six month period after Summerslam, or whenever all the current subscriptions expire. I also disagree with Dave/Alvarez' gloomy forcasts for future growth of the network- I think positive word-of-mouth will be helpful.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:03
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sportsgenius86 posted:Because why do that when you could drop the same amount for that same thing plus six-months access to a vast library of content plus five more PPVs that you don't have to watch but maybe could if you felt like it? Because people are stupid and don't think that rationally. There are people on the forums, with the network, that said they were going to order it on cable/satellite because they were worried about streaming issues.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:14
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Astro7x posted:This is not HBO or Showtime though. I can subscribe to Showtime primarily for movies and original Dramas, but check out the big fights because I have access to it and its on. I can also subscribe to Showtime for 1 month at a time for a big fight and then cancel it. I'm not even talking about events in a different billing cycle, I am talking about events 10 days apart. I don't think the variance will be nearly as high as with Strikeforce or boxing, but shows will have different audiences. If you wanted just WM, the Network was the same price for six months. If you wanted WM and Summerslam, the network was a big discount. You don't need to have zero interest in the B shows either, you might just not watch certain shows. WM is the show where the show is booked to gain the interest of as many people as possible. Someone who is interested in Lesnar or the streak or just all the hype might not bother tuning into everything. Because they are wrestling fans who are going to have the dates of these shows pounded into their heads, there will be much better viewership than for the PPVs. I don't know how much of the audience will watch each show, I don't think anyone does. I feel pretty confident saying it won't be close to universal though. As for the price hike, it was a bit hard to understand Dave last night since he'd cut out, but I don't think he was in favor of a $5 hike now, just that in retrospect they probably should have started with a higher price because the number that signed up for $10 looks like there aren't a lot of casuals in there and they'd get $15 out of the vast majority of them. They might be able to get away with a small increase next year, but I don't think he was saying they should increase the price to $15. I could be wrong though. I think that would be a mistake, you've established your price in the US at $10, a $5 increase is going to seem like a lot more now.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:14
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I'm in the wait-and-see boat on the end of year success of the Network myself, especially since it hasn't hit all the target devices yet (Xbone and native Smart TV firmware this summer, Fire TV shortly after, maybe a native Chromecast app and whatever else they cut a deal on later in the year). I'm also of the mind that the whole Streaming Device thing hasn't hit any sort of peak yet. Amazon's box and Chromecast selling like crazy are indicators of that. As far as price increases, they'll most likely give it a full year at least, maybe two for international indicators before they take any action.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:21
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MassRafTer posted:I'm not even talking about events in a different billing cycle, I am talking about events 10 days apart. I don't think the variance will be nearly as high as with Strikeforce or boxing, but shows will have different audiences. If you wanted just WM, the Network was the same price for six months. If you wanted WM and Summerslam, the network was a big discount. You don't need to have zero interest in the B shows either, you might just not watch certain shows. WM is the show where the show is booked to gain the interest of as many people as possible. Someone who is interested in Lesnar or the streak or just all the hype might not bother tuning into everything. Because they are wrestling fans who are going to have the dates of these shows pounded into their heads, there will be much better viewership than for the PPVs. I don't know how much of the audience will watch each show, I don't think anyone does. I feel pretty confident saying it won't be close to universal though. Well yes, they probably should have started at $15 or similar just to reduce the required amount of subscribers. I was about to follow this up with "And then slowly reduce the price to attract more once established and proven as a success" and then I realize that no company would ever do that if they didn't have to.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:34
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sportsgenius86 posted:so you're saying there's no way they could get away with raising the price 50% if they did legitimate market research which indicated they could get away with raising the price 50%? No. What I'm saying is the poster is basing his opinions of sweeping generalisations and nonsense. Also, I'm pretty sure they done "legitimate market research" to come up with the current price so I fail to see how they would do it again and come up with a 50% increase for no extra return to the customer, 12 months down the line
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Apr 8, 2014 22:42
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I Feast On Dogshit posted:No. What I'm saying is the poster is basing his opinions of sweeping generalisations and nonsense. I'm not advocating raising the cost here. I'm saying if there was evidence to them that they could do it without losing money, then yes, they could justify doing it. It would be incredibly dumb to do anytime soon and that evidence doesn't exist now but neither of us knows whether it will down the road. Also, a survey done before launch is not going to be indicative to how users feel after a year or so. It's entirely possible that people can change their minds about what they'd be willing to pay after using a service for a period of time. All I was doing was explaining the justification behind the $15 argument that has come up here and in podcasts and clearly stated that they could justify the increase if there was hard information that suggested doing so. I do feel that there are probably a significant portion of subscribers who spent $180 or more on PPVs each year. There's a better than not chance that they won't be able to justify it down the line but I don't know if they can, you don't know if they can and they don't know if they can.
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Apr 8, 2014 22:55
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There are a lot of tradeoffs I would be willing to make with the network. A 50% price increase I would be fine with if it meant a significant amount of extra (decent) original content
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Apr 8, 2014 22:59
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Advertising revenue for PPVs should take a big bump since WWE is now able to reasonably say "three times as many people will watch Extreme Rules as usual". I was surprised at first, I was expecting it to be over a million, since you have to figure the regular PPV is a watch party for people who would now say "hey, I can get the Network instead, it's much more reasonable and I don't have to go to a party." Or maybe that's what WWE was counting on, that people, instead of buying the PPV for their party would just get the Network and all those people there would say "wow, I need this." There will be a big bump in subscribers, I'm expecting.
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Apr 8, 2014 23:03
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Sky Shadowing posted:Advertising revenue for PPVs should take a big bump since WWE is now able to reasonably say "three times as many people will watch Extreme Rules as usual". The most important thing that will lead to a bump is it surviving Wrestlemania with minimal issues. As has been said, there's people here with the Network who bought the PPV anyway because they were afraid it wouldn't work. Now that the biggest, most watched show of the year has made it through with only a few audio techs being fired for that incident in the preshow, the only obstacle for the average person will be that 6 month commitment. They've proven they can do this.
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Apr 8, 2014 23:14
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Valeyard posted:There are a lot of tradeoffs I would be willing to make with the network. A 50% price increase I would be fine with if it meant a significant amount of extra (decent) original content Really as an end user I'm looking for more of their nonstop glorified infommercials.
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Apr 9, 2014 00:19
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hahaha dusty's entrance music for starrcade '84 is priceless. it sounds like they pressed a smooth jazz button on a keyboard. these early starrcades are like the coleman francis films of wrestling.
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Apr 9, 2014 00:56
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Some Other Guy posted:. these early starrcades are like the coleman francis films of wrestling. Coleman Francis....tell me more.
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Apr 9, 2014 01:06
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Some Other Guy posted:hahaha dusty's entrance music for starrcade '84 is priceless. it sounds like they pressed a smooth jazz button on a keyboard. these early starrcades are like the coleman francis films of wrestling. Originally his music for '84 was a karaoke instrumental cover of Purple Rain.
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Apr 9, 2014 01:41
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Moving WM off the Network could probably be survived with more Slam City I really love Slam City
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Apr 9, 2014 01:53
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I seriously have doubts about them reaching a million subs. There is a core group of friends that I have over for PPVs, have for years- not one of them, even the two who drive 160 miles round trip to watch PPVs at my place, has the network. In fact, I don't know a single person outside of PSP that has it. That said, the stream quality during WM was loving amazing and I take back everything I said about the network almost certainly dying. In fact, I forgot that I had shared my password with a guy from work who was out yesterday, he came in today and told me he watched the whole thing in crystal clarity too. So I personally have zero complaints. I cannot believe it worked as well as it did.
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Apr 9, 2014 02:06
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Nut Bunnies posted:Moving WM off the Network could probably be survived with more Slam City I want the 1980s cartoon...seriously they need to add it. Slam City is pretty fun. It's such a bizarre concept just like that YA novel where Vince works with FBI and uses the super stars to take down a meth ring.....it really exists. It's called Big apple takedown or something similar. Marshal Prolapse fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 02:26
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$10 is a nice monthly payment, as it fades into the background of all my other purchases and monthly charges. $15 monthly, however, not as easy to swallow.
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Apr 9, 2014 02:29
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What's important isn't how the Network's doing now. What's important is that, in 10-15 years when the internet subscription model has suddenly exploded and is killing broadcast TV, the WWE will be there, already entrenched and with a subscription base. It's amazingly forward-looking and is going to have them sitting pretty when a lot of established brands are flailing.
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Apr 9, 2014 02:57
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I'm effectively paying $15 for it since I have the network sub and $5/mo for a vpn which I only use for the Network. If the price goes up by five bucks before it comes out in Canada and I can ditch the vpn, I'm unlikely to re-up. $20 is about the breaking point, so to speak, for me when something like Netflix is less than half that.
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Apr 9, 2014 03:00
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flashy_mcflash posted:I'm effectively paying $15 for it since I have the network sub and $5/mo for a vpn which I only use for the Network. If the price goes up by five bucks before it comes out in Canada and I can ditch the vpn, I'm unlikely to re-up. $20 is about the breaking point, so to speak, for me when something like Netflix is less than half that. The exchange rate makes it like $12 now, too!
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Apr 9, 2014 03:21
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Guys, relax, it's doubtful that they'll raise prices for at least a year, and even then it likely won't shoot up to 15 bucks unless something goes terribly wrong. They just need enough to be profitable and they may only need to increase the price a dollar or two. No one how much they may need to increase (if any) until they actually have information necessary to make that decision.
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Apr 9, 2014 03:27
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gfanikf posted:Coleman Francis....tell me more. the production is comically inept in the first two starrcades. you can tell hicks in greensboro nc were doing it. wccw television in 1982 is night and day better, to put it in perspective. compared to the early wrestlemanias there really is no comparison, unless you like poo poo like brass knuckle matches and gary hart slashing everyone with razor blades. there are a few good matches but the early starrcades are also ridiculously long.
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Apr 9, 2014 03:37
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Hall of Fame's been pulled from the Network, so bad luck if you were thinking of going back and watching Warrior's speech for some reason.
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Apr 9, 2014 05:21
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njsykora posted:Hall of Fame's been pulled from the Network, so bad luck if you were thinking of going back and watching Warrior's speech for some reason. So, I watched on Sunday, and closed the stream with about 30 minutes left. It sounded like Warrior was winding down his speech. Did he just keep going for 30 more minutes, or what did I miss?
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Apr 9, 2014 05:24
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