WWE Monday Night Raw’s new TV home, Netflix Inc., is where sports fans are increasingly streaming to.
This week’s debut of WWE Raw on Netflix after 20 years on USA Network signals the latest tremor in a massive shift of viewers from network and cable TV to streaming services like Netflix, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Comcast Corp. for live sporting events like professional wrestling, the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL, boxing, soccer the Olympics, and auto racing.
It’s been a particularly busy patch for Netflix. In addition to WWE Raw, which it signed to a 10-year, $5 billion deal last year, the No. 1 streaming service presented the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight in November that reeled in more than 100 million viewers; two NFL games on Christmas that drew a combined 65 million U.S. viewers; the eating contest between Joey Chestnut and Kobayashi; with much more to come.
Netflix said the inaugural of Raw
averaged 2.6 million American households, more than double Raw’s average 2024 U.S. audience of 1.2 million households, and higher than any Monday Night Raw broadcast in the past five years. [That puts in the neighborhood of
popular network TV series audiences that draw less than 10 million. The top-rated shows are typically NFL games, with viewership of up to 25 million.]
“I’ve been lobbying for live for a few years,” Brandon Riegg, vice president of nonfiction and sports at Netflix, recently told The Athletic about live sports programs. “It started with a Chris Rock stand-up special in March 2023. I’ve always believed that, down the road, things would come to us that required a live functionality.”
“At its core, it’s no different to any other entertainment program,” Riegg added. “It’s a case of saying, ‘What does it cost?’ and then, ‘What’s the return of that investment in terms of how many people are watching it and their level of engagement?’ It’s no different to (dating show) Love Is Blind, (dramas) Black Doves or Stranger Things. We look at it through that same lens.”
It hasn’t all gone smoothly. Live streams of mega-audiences come with technical challenges, as Netflix and its viewers learned painfully during the Tyson-Paul bout. Viewers endured constant buffering, forcing them to watch the fight in 480p. Since then, the Christmas football games were broadcast with no problem and the three-hour Monday Night Raw debut from Los Angeles went without a hitch.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos famously said in October 2023, “We’re not anti-sports. We’re just pro-profit.” Despite expansion into live broadcasts, especially those involving sports, reservations linger.
Nonetheless, massive viewing figures like the ones generated by the NFL and Jake Paul’s fight with “Iron Mike” Tyson, not to mention the younger viewers they attract, are hard to ignore.
The allure of demographically desirable viewers — most of whom have cut their cable cord and watch most events from their smartphones and tablets — has proved irresistible to leading streaming services like Apple TV+ (MLB, Major League Soccer), Comcast’s Peacock (WWE pay-per-views, NFL, Olympics), Amazon Prime Video (Thursday Night Football, NBA) and Disney+ (NFL, NHL).
Indeed, on Monday Disney and streaming provider FuboTV agreed to merge their online live TV businesses, combining sports programming from Hulu, Disney’s ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox.
Should it pass regulatory scrutiny, the service would reach more than 6 million subscribers, second only in all-digital TV services to Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube TV.
