I’ve been told the WWE-Netflix deal is backloaded, meaning payments to WWE from Netflix will be greater later in the term and lower earlier in the ten-year term. This is consistent with the move of WWE programming to Netflix around the world happening gradually as various international rights with incumbents expire.
As noted in TKO’s announcement on Tuesday, all WWE programming in the U.K., Canada, and Latin America will move to Netflix in January 2025. WWE’s biggest media market outside of the U.S. is India, where WWE has a deal in place with Sony. I believe the deal with Sony will expire at the end of 2025, after which WWE content will move to Netflix in India.
In the U.S., only Raw moves to Netflix beginning next year.
Questions remain about where WWE Raw will air in the U.S. from October to December this year. WWE’s deal with NBCUniversal to air Raw on the USA Network expires in October and the term to begin airing Raw on Netflix doesn’t begin until January 2025. I asked an NBCU spokesperson if there’s an extension in place or being worked on to keep Raw on USA for an extra three months but that sounds like that’s not the case at this point.
“[You are] [c]orrect that RAW will no longer be on USA after October 2024,” an NBCU representative wrote to me in an email on Wednesday. “In regard to what is happening with Raw between October and December, probably best to reach out to WWE.”
I asked a WWE representative but have yet to hear back. When I brought this up Wednesday on Pollock & Thurston with our guest Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, he said, “I have heard back from WWE and they basically said that there will be an announcement coming very soon” on where Raw will air from October to December in the U.S.
Following up on my estimate that the Netflix deal represents a 1.2x to 1.3x increase in value across all of the agreements it will replace: analyst Brandon Ross from LightShed came to a similar conclusion using a different methodology.
“We believe that if you look at year 3 of the prior set of deals, versus year 3 of all the WWE media rights on the new set (including SmackDown but excluding the domestic Network deal which is nearing a conclusion),” Ross wrote, “the step-up is in the 1.2-1.3x range, with the non-SmackDown rights up about 1.1x. “
A third estimate, from David Baldini at PWInsider, put the deal at a 33% increase (or 1.33x).
Raw’s current average annual value is $265 million for rights in the U.S. with NBCU. A 30% increase over that value is $345 million. A 20% increase is $318 million. For comparison, Smackdown got a raise from $205 million on average per year currently from Fox to $287 million per year in its next deal with NBCU when the show moves to the USA Network in the fall.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos declined on Tuesday evening on the streamer’s earnings call to get into specifics on the cost of the deal with WWE.