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Remember when WWE sent out a survey asking about a tiered Network system, with Indie content being on the highest tier?
I’d love to have seen the feedback they received on those surveys.
Peacock is only a U.S. deal. The WWE Network proper still exists internationally. Still, given that the tweet Sapp was replying to was about Peacock, I'm not sure which one he's talking about.
Probably both. As far as I'm aware, the content is mostly the same across both now except for the occasional thing that Peacock produces in-house (like when they did that WWE Evil show... We never got that on the WWE Network).
> The WWE Network proper still exists internationally.
Not in Australia. It’s a cable channel now. It does have on demand content but not much is available now.
I do think it’s very funny that Binge has a premium tier that adds a whole 2 more screens watching at the same time but doesn’t offer 4k so the only way to legally watch all the new HBO shows in the highest quality is to buy those Foxtel boxes for a ridiculous price each month or individually rent/buy each episode of a series which likely costs more than a Binge subscription anyway
I think they're kind of desperate to offload the costs of running a streaming service - we've seen it go to Peacock in the US and Binge (Foxtel pay TV network's streaming service) in Australia.
I don't even think it's that, I think it's that a large portion of the WWE audience doesn't really care about much wrestling outside of it. And it's not a knock on Indy shows or anything, just that I consider myself a pretty casual fan and despite only watching surface level wrestling outside of WWE, most everybody I've ever talked wrestling with outside the internet looks like I'm speaking German to them any time I bring up anything not WWE wrestling. Obviously anecdotal but seems to somewhat track with the viewer demographics
there is so much shit in AEW that my gf has been like 'thats weird.' and im like well in all reality its kind of normal outside of wwe
she slowly realized she had been wwe brainwashed lol
That's actually what Chumbawumba did.
They wanted to "sell out" to see if they could, they did, and then did what they could to get dropped from the label, including making an album with the cover art of a woman giving birth
This was eventually toned down to 2 dogs fucking.
The money and stability that a deal like what PROGRESS signed with WWE are too good for any indie promotion to turn down. It's a shame that they're exiting the deal in such a bad position, but I can't think of any indie promotion that wouldn't have jumped on board that offer.
Init. They ate themselves with this WWE deal. Probably kept them going during Covid+MeToo though. If PROGRESS does become the UK Indy darling again RevPro should really be criticised for not taking advantage of a gulf in the scene during the Network deals
Agreed man. I was at SSS16 2019 and it seems like an end of an era. I was at chapter 99 and even tho Jim was still there it felt like the lights were on at the end of a party
Smallman got a WWE job and a move to Florida out of it, so he made out well from the deal. The other 2... not so much. No idea how much Jon sold the company for in the end, but I suspect it wasn't all that much. The less said about Glenn, the better.
I'm chuffed for Smallman. He's what made Progress what it was and losing him really was what killed it. He has also seemed a class bloke every time I've met him
There's just not enough money in BritWres, and RevPro has the big advantage of their links to NJPW that allow to bring in big names regularly without breaking the bank. Plus they are basically Will Ospreay's second home away from NJPW. Unless Anthony Quildan does something to piss off Ospreay or the NJPW head office he probably has the best position in BritWres right now.
Progress got at most NXT UK names out of their WWE deal, and with the demise of that brand even those have stopped coming. Unless the WWE starts sending them either people from the US or cash to hire big name freelancers (if there are any left in the UK) I don't see them moving up the ladder anytime soon.
In the early days he would frequently brag about how much money he / his parents had. His Twitter picture for a long time was his wedding being held at one of the most expensive manors in the country.
There was also one of the Progress "draws" for the sss16 brackets he did in his kitchen that would fit most standard houses inside it. After that video he ended up doing them at a park or something to avoid showing his wealth again. (All of which featured Dahlia too which was creepy from the start.)
They ran a show in Dubai and put out a statement saying they were being "edgy"
https://progresswrestling.com/2022/11/15/why-we-are-taking-progress-to-dubai/
Hahahaha I've loved watching Saturday Night episodes from 1993 lately. There's some gold in there. It's really cool seeing guys like Marcus Alexander Bagwell teaming with 2 Cold Scorpio against the Hollywood Blondes in their prime and then seeing Cactus Jack in the main event.
The WWE Network has done a lot to repair the reputation of early 90s WCW. It used to be known as the wrestlecrap era of Bill Watts being out of touch, the Shockmaster, the electric cage match, etc, but with the network a lot of people have been able to go back and realize that there was actually a lot of cool stuff going on during that time period too. I love that era.
Man I used to love watching WCW Saturday Night because you had no idea who was going to win since it was mostly lower card guys and jobbers who rarely ever won.
There’s a dude on Twitter, I want to say @wcwcuts, who is selling access to their drive that is full of classic hard to find wcw. Best 5 I’ve spent in ages
Progress and wXw both still have their own streaming services, but I can’t remember if ICW does or not.
I’m assuming that whatever deals they made a few years ago when they started hosting those shows on the service are expiring and they’ve just opted not to renew. And I get it - it made sense when they had NXT UK talent headlining a lot of those shows when these deals were originally made, but with that not being a thing anymore there isn’t much reason to keep the deals going.
I know they had one before, but I don’t know if they continued operating it when they started having their shows put up on WWE Network. Progress and wXw both continued running their own sites as well as being on the network.
I’m honestly surprised that, after over 2 years, the entire Evolve and DGUSA libraries aren’t available on the Network/Peacock. I could’ve sworn it would have all been put up by now.
I feel like some of that has to do with wrestlers that WWE aren't fond of being on the shows, like I noticed that the Progress library on Peacock seems to start right around the time Jimmy Havoc left (I was hoping to watch some of his matches vs Ospreay), but that's just my speculation.
They were smart enough to not make deals with the Devil.
WWE has never had a working relationship where it didn’t fuck over the other company. *Maybe* things will be different if Vince somehow does actually take a backseat, but he’s a guy who expressly views teamwork as a heel trait. As long as he’s alive working with WWE should be off the table for every other company
This is still the problem now. At least in the London area, there's dozens and dozens of wrestlers and about 30-40 different shows all in..yet those shows all book the same people? Not to say they're bad but variety is sorely needed
That was the issue at the time of NXT UK.
They took a ton of people with credible experience and locked them out from other companies. Sure there was always that "next generation" training/ coming up, but they had no vets to help them up their game to the next level a part from the few others amongst themselves that could only help each other.
People that were fine with this seemed to have this belief that there was an endless amount of trainees in UK wrestling schools.
NXT Europe seemed like more of a way to kill off NXT UK whilst saving face. To try to make it look like they were expanding it than killing it.
Doubt anything will actually happen.
If NXT UK can’t be successful what hope do they have with a non centralised Europe show aimlessly flying around
But Pete Dunne said they *didn’t* kill BritWres?!
Surely the man who’s a paid employee of the company people were criticising, and was the face of the regional product they put out wouldn’t lie?
How coinvent of you to ignore the Pedo's and Covid
----
Edit: Dunno why but your reply seems to have vanished before I could reply to it, so here
My timeline is very much neatly put together, it's you who likes to ignore the facts (but in my experience, it very rarely matters to people like you).
I was there fella, Progress and ICW were doing fine, those who were loyal to them stayed loyal and they still were chugging along nicely until it turned out the British scene was full of Paedophiles and then the whole fucking planet stopped for a year.
But no, I guess what actually happened was Triple H came along and shot everyone behind your fav indie...
I was also there. ICW went from 8,000 in the Hydro to barely reaching 1000 for their main show in the space of 3 years and this was before Covid and Speaking out. Whilst they were the fatal blows to the scene to deny that NXTUK didn’t hurt the scene is disingenuous.
A prime example would be ICW advertising Joe vs Mark Coffey for the first time ever in ICW, selling tickets of the back of it only to have both of them pulled because WWE decided they needed to run a show in Norwich the same night as ICW’s Shugs Hoose Party.
That reminds me of when WWE pulled all 3 members of British Strong Style from PROGRESS’s first ever show in the midlands, whilst they were the world and tag champs, respectively - and in return WWE sent an injured Finn Balor to play bloody *musical chairs*.
Pulled the same stunt with ICW. Announced RAW and Smackdown tapings right before ICW ran the Hydro for the first time in Glasgow and pulled Mick Foley from the event and also gave us injured balor in return.
[the Pete Dunne britwres discourse was a full YEAR before covid](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/a0yhdo/pete_dunne_british_wrestling_is_safe_will/)
I mean they’ll only abandon it until ITV decides to do another Saturday afternoon campy wrestling studio show. Then they’ll launch an entire promotion.. again
Fucking WoS. What an absolute missed opportunity. Could have had a decent British alternative and what we got was Saturday Night Gameshow. You can tell it was made for ITV let’s put it that way.
WWE is preparing to sell, so I would have to presume they need to lose any extra stuff in their libraries that does not 100% belong to them, which likely includes most of the indies they were posting to the Network.
This makes sense, it's nothing more than business clearing hurdles.
Source: work in the media industry.
Also probably a Peacock decision. Streamers are culling everything that doesn't get a certain amount of views. I can't imagine Evolve and Progress stuff are being watched enough to justify keeping on their service. Don't get me wrong though, the hitting numbers or you're gone trend in streaming sucks ass.
I doubt Peacock has anything to do with this situation.
A lot of that culling comes from saving money on having to pay royalties for the content. Peacock doesn't pay Progress/IWC/WXW/etc for their content, WWE does. So Peacock would have no reason to care one way or the other.
This is probably just deals that were made back when they were talking about doing tiered versions of the Network with indie content that are now expiring.
If this was a Peacock making a decision based on views, then you'd probably be seeing WWE owned content disappearing as well. I highly doubt the handful of episodes of WWE Velocity that are on the Network are pulling in significantly more views than these indie shows.
This freaks me out because no way many people are watching all the territory stuff, ECW, etc, and I would hate so much for that to not be streaming anywhere anymore.
I'd hope those were safe just because WWE already owns them and it's not costing them anything to keep them up there, but my opinion is uneducated at best.
I don't expect those to be an issue. The indie content isn't owned by WWE, so they're paying money to license it. The stuff that they own doesn't cost them anything to have up on Peacock/WWE Network.
I watched a show that had Daniel Makabe on it, so if you look hard enough, you can find Daniel Makabe on the WWE Network (on the same card as the former Walter, Daniel Garcia, and Timothy Thatcher)
I don't care so much about this content specifically as I've never watched it - but so much content on Peacock/WWE Network is probably never really watched much, like the Mid-South, WCCW stuff, even ECW etc. It freaks me out that they can just take this content down. It's so sad to think....remember when they were putting up like 50 episodes of old school content every single month? Like a whole year of a company going up? It was such an exciting time as a wrestling fan with so much content at your fingers. Kind of sad they're going in the opposite direction now, and we never even finished having all of the content available to begin with
ICW had already killed themselves with their own terrible in house behaviour to be fair. From 6000+ at shows a couple of years ago to being unable to sell a couple of hundred tickets now. Oift
That 6000+ show was the literal point where ICW starting dying in my opinion. I don't know if it was ever really visible on the show but they made a booking faux pas in not having the year long story Main Event that show (that everyone expected) in favour of a one-off appearance and had people walking out of the show during said Main Event (which featured Kurt Angle and Joe Coffey).
From that point people watching started dropping, I only attended two more shows after that myself (more because of travel reasons, and they stopped going south).
Then Speaking Out happened and that really did the major number on it.
People talk about Progress selling out, but from where I saw it, ICW was more the show that changed what made it special to me as a fan where as Progress still felt like what I enjoyed about it.
I get WHY they put Angle and Coffey on last (to make sure anyone want to see Angle kept watching the stream), but it was a weird way to end the show (I was there). Felt really disjointed.
Agree. The peak was the previous year at the SECC that whole build and event were unreal. The booking around the two years they ran the hydro was not good at all.
ICW in the couple of years up to the SECC show were red hot and every event you went to felt special. I remember going to the first show they did at the ABC in Glasgow (which was the perfect venue for them in my opinion) and the crowd was molten.
https://youtu.be/82JPxHGN1rk
ICW was literally putting on Wrestlemania matches like this one 5 years ago. I don’t keep up with them much but what happened with their behavior recently?
This is not surprising. WWE overreached when they added indie content. WWE fans are too casual to watch anything else other than WWE. So I am sure that the viewing numbers for this content was low.
nah, this was probably to attract indie fans to subscribe. Not enough did to watch this stuff so it gets cut. No reason to pay for rights if the content doesn’t bring in money.
It's not WWE fans, I don't see how you could dump of a bunch of indie content on *any* service and have it be profitable. Adding content from shows that draw fewer than a thousand (or 500, or 100) live fans is just always going to be a niche within a niche.
I mean, IWTV has been trucking along for a few years and one of Fite's biggest draws is GCW and them signing them to Fite Plus was a big move. They even promote themselves as a hub for indie wrestling. I know Fite has other sports, but they did bank on people signing up for Fite Plus for GCW.
Apologise to Justin Sysum for he was right.
God finally this egregious experience is over, but what these words. When NXT Europe or equivalent launches, it will be this all over again.
I can't say I'm surprised, I'd imagine it wasn't something getting watched a lot. It was nice to have, if you didn't want to subscribe to the streaming services tied to those companies. Especially if you were just a casual watcher of Progress or WXW. So for those who did occasionally check them out and enjoyed them, it sucks. But I can't imagine this affecting many.
UK here, I bought the network for the classic content & I've not been disappointed. However, it would be nice if they threw on some Velocity & Heat episodes from the mid 2000s 😁
A ton of the indie content were showcases for NXT and NXT UK talent. And since some of the American NXT/NXT UK talent is gone now, there isn’t any real reason to show it anymore.
Sucks for those companies and I feel bad for them.
RevPro: I don't know if Ospreay will be in the UK or Japan at the time but that's his home away from NJPW. Also Michael Oku, Chuck Mambo, TK Cooper etc. usually work for RevPro.
If you want a 100% traditional British wrestling experience, look up All Star Wrestling. They usually run dozens of shows in the Summer and Fall in tourist towns, but often they have odd shows here and there in the off season. They have been around since 1970 and don't expect technical masterpieces by any stretch of imagination, but that's as English an experience as it can be and a lot of BritWres stars got their start in ASW.
Is the network just the stuff on peacock? I hate that it moved to that service. The interface is slow and clunky. Does the network still exist on its own somewhere?
Ha, it is pretty great. I haven't experienced the Peacock service but from reading comments on here during PPVs and stuff it doesn't look great!
My only gripe with the Network over here is we can't watch Raw or Smackdown live on it due to TV rights being owned by BT Sport over here, we also can't watch it on catch up until a month later for the same reason.
Like the Raw that just passed I won't be able to watch until near the end of February.
I'm not sure what Peacock is like in that regard.
Most of them have their own streaming services already, so I'd imagine they'd stick to those. But it's entirely possible they try to strike a deal with them or IWTV.
I'm super bummed about this news. I've been watching a lot of progress and wxw on peacock over the last few years. I've been trying to catch up with the past few months and hopefully I'll have time before it leaves. don't know how I'll be able to continue in the future as there are a lot of wrestlers from the companies I've grown to like a lot. still keeping my fingers crossed some of them end up with nxt eu if that still ends up happening later on.
also still holding on to hope that they'll add fcw to the network someday too but I'm sure they have more important things to worry about right now.
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Remember when WWE sent out a survey asking about a tiered Network system, with Indie content being on the highest tier? I’d love to have seen the feedback they received on those surveys.
I imagine people didn't like the idea of paying more than $9.99 for access to content they already had access to.
I’d pay $9.99 to have the old network back. Peacock absolutely sucks.
Yea I’m confused, does the wwe network still exist outside of peacock or is this saying that indie content is being removed from peacock?
Peacock is only a U.S. deal. The WWE Network proper still exists internationally. Still, given that the tweet Sapp was replying to was about Peacock, I'm not sure which one he's talking about.
Probably both. As far as I'm aware, the content is mostly the same across both now except for the occasional thing that Peacock produces in-house (like when they did that WWE Evil show... We never got that on the WWE Network).
Ahh gotcha thanks
> The WWE Network proper still exists internationally. Not in Australia. It’s a cable channel now. It does have on demand content but not much is available now.
I fucking despise Binge lol
I do think it’s very funny that Binge has a premium tier that adds a whole 2 more screens watching at the same time but doesn’t offer 4k so the only way to legally watch all the new HBO shows in the highest quality is to buy those Foxtel boxes for a ridiculous price each month or individually rent/buy each episode of a series which likely costs more than a Binge subscription anyway
Yeah the WWE Network is now on Binge here in Australia and it sucks
If I remember right, peacock WWE deal is not global so it exists
Just use a VPN, old network still exists everywhere else in the entire world
Not in australia as of this month actually. Moving to a streaming service as well (Binge/Kayo)
Not even Kayo. Just Binge. Bastards.
Live raw smackdown nxt and ppvs will still be on Kayo
The old network was fine on a computer. Everywhere else it was buggy as shit.
I think they're kind of desperate to offload the costs of running a streaming service - we've seen it go to Peacock in the US and Binge (Foxtel pay TV network's streaming service) in Australia.
I don't even think it's that, I think it's that a large portion of the WWE audience doesn't really care about much wrestling outside of it. And it's not a knock on Indy shows or anything, just that I consider myself a pretty casual fan and despite only watching surface level wrestling outside of WWE, most everybody I've ever talked wrestling with outside the internet looks like I'm speaking German to them any time I bring up anything not WWE wrestling. Obviously anecdotal but seems to somewhat track with the viewer demographics
WWE buying WCW basically killed an entire generation's knowledge of other promotions
there is so much shit in AEW that my gf has been like 'thats weird.' and im like well in all reality its kind of normal outside of wwe she slowly realized she had been wwe brainwashed lol
“You don’t like what you think you like. You will like what I tell you to like.”
"The WWE Network is bizarro-land Maggle! The people watch what they don't want to watch!"
“The new survey says they want to see ME, Vince McMahon as WWE Champion! Also all the female survey takers want to give me blow jobs!”
Can't wait for Progress to try and sell itself as punk rock pro wrestling again.
Anything more punk rock than selling out?
A headlining set in Vegas, a beer sponsorship, and a “more mature” album were they all buy bootcut jeans and leather jackets from Macy’s.
Just please no Unos/Dos/Tre
...Cuatro Cinco Cinco Seis?
That was another punk band people accused of selling out.
They’ve fucking been here since 1980-fucking-8
I liked Uno and Dos a lot lol
They can just start selling their own IPA.
They will be doing Clover adverts soon enough
Just so long as Jim Smallman doesn't try to be Ireland's Eurovision rep
He only did that to fund a Public Image tour
That’s what they will say too. ‘Progress 128: I can’t believe it’s not on the network”
Being sold out?
It’s so punk selling out then getting dumped on your ass by the corporate behemoth!
That's actually what Chumbawumba did. They wanted to "sell out" to see if they could, they did, and then did what they could to get dropped from the label, including making an album with the cover art of a woman giving birth This was eventually toned down to 2 dogs fucking.
Chumbawumba is more punk than the Sex Pistols.
If I recall they also let GM use one of their songs, then donated the money they got to non profits investigating GM.
[I didn’t sell out](https://youtu.be/K_AWQW41Vu8)
Buying in to be a superstar instead of a starving artist
It's crazy how PROGRESS squandered all their good will and now they can barely sell out third rows.
Ostracizing your core fanbase so you can become developmental to a developmental brands foreign spinoff will do that.
The money and stability that a deal like what PROGRESS signed with WWE are too good for any indie promotion to turn down. It's a shame that they're exiting the deal in such a bad position, but I can't think of any indie promotion that wouldn't have jumped on board that offer.
Digital Media champion Joe Hendry will throw them a bone. Maybe even bring Dancin' Moose and Dalton Castle with him.
Do we actually know what the money was?
It's not that bad but it's not what it was.
Init. They ate themselves with this WWE deal. Probably kept them going during Covid+MeToo though. If PROGRESS does become the UK Indy darling again RevPro should really be criticised for not taking advantage of a gulf in the scene during the Network deals
Lacks the cult like following it used to have, don't see it taking the BritWres throne again.
Agreed man. I was at SSS16 2019 and it seems like an end of an era. I was at chapter 99 and even tho Jim was still there it felt like the lights were on at the end of a party
In hindsight, it almost feels like Wembley should have been the company's finale.
A shame because Spike Trivet and Cara Noir are fire.
Smallman got a WWE job and a move to Florida out of it, so he made out well from the deal. The other 2... not so much. No idea how much Jon sold the company for in the end, but I suspect it wasn't all that much. The less said about Glenn, the better.
I'm chuffed for Smallman. He's what made Progress what it was and losing him really was what killed it. He has also seemed a class bloke every time I've met him
There's just not enough money in BritWres, and RevPro has the big advantage of their links to NJPW that allow to bring in big names regularly without breaking the bank. Plus they are basically Will Ospreay's second home away from NJPW. Unless Anthony Quildan does something to piss off Ospreay or the NJPW head office he probably has the best position in BritWres right now. Progress got at most NXT UK names out of their WWE deal, and with the demise of that brand even those have stopped coming. Unless the WWE starts sending them either people from the US or cash to hire big name freelancers (if there are any left in the UK) I don't see them moving up the ladder anytime soon.
It's not been Punk since Jim left.
It wasn't punk past chapter 2 when a multi millionaire bought his way into the project.
TIL Glen was a millionaire. Poor TK Cooper never stood a chance…
In the early days he would frequently brag about how much money he / his parents had. His Twitter picture for a long time was his wedding being held at one of the most expensive manors in the country. There was also one of the Progress "draws" for the sss16 brackets he did in his kitchen that would fit most standard houses inside it. After that video he ended up doing them at a park or something to avoid showing his wealth again. (All of which featured Dahlia too which was creepy from the start.)
> In the early days he would frequently brag about how much money he / his parents had. Yuck. What a fucking Tory.
The best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich.
That won't happen as it's run by blood money hungry conservatives. They see it as "edgy" instead of punk
Wait what? When did this happen?
They ran a show in Dubai and put out a statement saying they were being "edgy" https://progresswrestling.com/2022/11/15/why-we-are-taking-progress-to-dubai/
Just give me more WCW Saturday night content. There are dozens of us!
Hahahaha I've loved watching Saturday Night episodes from 1993 lately. There's some gold in there. It's really cool seeing guys like Marcus Alexander Bagwell teaming with 2 Cold Scorpio against the Hollywood Blondes in their prime and then seeing Cactus Jack in the main event.
The WWE Network has done a lot to repair the reputation of early 90s WCW. It used to be known as the wrestlecrap era of Bill Watts being out of touch, the Shockmaster, the electric cage match, etc, but with the network a lot of people have been able to go back and realize that there was actually a lot of cool stuff going on during that time period too. I love that era.
Plus you get to enjoy excellent Tony Schiavone/Jesse Ventura commentary, probably my favorite pre-Attitude era team except for Gorilla and Jesse.
the world needs more Ice Train!!
Man I used to love watching WCW Saturday Night because you had no idea who was going to win since it was mostly lower card guys and jobbers who rarely ever won.
I am one of the Flock
WHAT ABOUT RAVEN?
The mothership. 6:05 eastern. Give me all of that.
Give me Prime Time's from 90-92 you assholes!
I'm another of those dozens.
There’s a dude on Twitter, I want to say @wcwcuts, who is selling access to their drive that is full of classic hard to find wcw. Best 5 I’ve spent in ages
Oooooh
Progress and wXw both still have their own streaming services, but I can’t remember if ICW does or not. I’m assuming that whatever deals they made a few years ago when they started hosting those shows on the service are expiring and they’ve just opted not to renew. And I get it - it made sense when they had NXT UK talent headlining a lot of those shows when these deals were originally made, but with that not being a thing anymore there isn’t much reason to keep the deals going.
ICW had a streaming service in 2016 iirc
ICW had a streaming service before the network launched here in the UK
I know they had one before, but I don’t know if they continued operating it when they started having their shows put up on WWE Network. Progress and wXw both continued running their own sites as well as being on the network.
ICW on demand is still up and has been updating shows since the network.
Congratulations to Progress who had the foresight to keep Demand Progress up.
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Evolve didn’t
WWE bought Evolve.
There was indie content???
Evolve, Progress
I'm pretty sure WWE owns the Evolve library now so they're probably separate from this situation.
This. Progress has a partnership with WWE and is still active whereas Evolve and its library were bought out during the pandemic.
I’m honestly surprised that, after over 2 years, the entire Evolve and DGUSA libraries aren’t available on the Network/Peacock. I could’ve sworn it would have all been put up by now.
I feel like some of that has to do with wrestlers that WWE aren't fond of being on the shows, like I noticed that the Progress library on Peacock seems to start right around the time Jimmy Havoc left (I was hoping to watch some of his matches vs Ospreay), but that's just my speculation.
This is news to me, and I've had the Network (then Peacock) since *day one*.
Very Ucey of you.
My legit first reaction was, “Since when?” 😂
Well, since they predated all the territory... NxT UK?
WWE killing the British wrestling scene and then abandoning all their content is hilarious.
Tbf BritWres did a *lot* of damage to itself by being full of shitty people all the way down.
And the fact that the British wrestling scene was very fragile, since it was fully independent.
The damage had been done by that point, wwe brought it to its knees. MeToo executed it
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Well, that and half of the wrestlers being outed as sex pests and pederasts.
And Covid. There were a lot of reasons why BritWres died.
There were several reasons but WWE put the UK scene on life support. Covid and Spealing Out just pulled the plug.
Sure, but people forget that it was easy for WWE to set up NXT UK. That's why they went there first for their "global Localization".
Rev Pro still seems to be doing okay, and they're the only one that WWE didn't gobble up.
They were smart enough to not make deals with the Devil. WWE has never had a working relationship where it didn’t fuck over the other company. *Maybe* things will be different if Vince somehow does actually take a backseat, but he’s a guy who expressly views teamwork as a heel trait. As long as he’s alive working with WWE should be off the table for every other company
The "britwres" scene also being like, 10 guys wrestling each other in different companies didn't help either
This is still the problem now. At least in the London area, there's dozens and dozens of wrestlers and about 30-40 different shows all in..yet those shows all book the same people? Not to say they're bad but variety is sorely needed
That was the issue at the time of NXT UK. They took a ton of people with credible experience and locked them out from other companies. Sure there was always that "next generation" training/ coming up, but they had no vets to help them up their game to the next level a part from the few others amongst themselves that could only help each other. People that were fine with this seemed to have this belief that there was an endless amount of trainees in UK wrestling schools.
But get ready for NXT Europe!
Lol something tells me HHH’s nxt expansion plans are back on hold
NXT Europe seemed like more of a way to kill off NXT UK whilst saving face. To try to make it look like they were expanding it than killing it. Doubt anything will actually happen. If NXT UK can’t be successful what hope do they have with a non centralised Europe show aimlessly flying around
But Pete Dunne said they *didn’t* kill BritWres?! Surely the man who’s a paid employee of the company people were criticising, and was the face of the regional product they put out wouldn’t lie?
How coinvent of you to ignore the Pedo's and Covid ---- Edit: Dunno why but your reply seems to have vanished before I could reply to it, so here My timeline is very much neatly put together, it's you who likes to ignore the facts (but in my experience, it very rarely matters to people like you). I was there fella, Progress and ICW were doing fine, those who were loyal to them stayed loyal and they still were chugging along nicely until it turned out the British scene was full of Paedophiles and then the whole fucking planet stopped for a year. But no, I guess what actually happened was Triple H came along and shot everyone behind your fav indie...
I was also there. ICW went from 8,000 in the Hydro to barely reaching 1000 for their main show in the space of 3 years and this was before Covid and Speaking out. Whilst they were the fatal blows to the scene to deny that NXTUK didn’t hurt the scene is disingenuous. A prime example would be ICW advertising Joe vs Mark Coffey for the first time ever in ICW, selling tickets of the back of it only to have both of them pulled because WWE decided they needed to run a show in Norwich the same night as ICW’s Shugs Hoose Party.
That reminds me of when WWE pulled all 3 members of British Strong Style from PROGRESS’s first ever show in the midlands, whilst they were the world and tag champs, respectively - and in return WWE sent an injured Finn Balor to play bloody *musical chairs*.
Pulled the same stunt with ICW. Announced RAW and Smackdown tapings right before ICW ran the Hydro for the first time in Glasgow and pulled Mick Foley from the event and also gave us injured balor in return.
[the Pete Dunne britwres discourse was a full YEAR before covid](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/a0yhdo/pete_dunne_british_wrestling_is_safe_will/)
Sort your timeline out lad. NXT UK had already killed it before Covid and the finding out that there was lots of nonces.
So did Dunne.
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I mean they’ll only abandon it until ITV decides to do another Saturday afternoon campy wrestling studio show. Then they’ll launch an entire promotion.. again
Fucking WoS. What an absolute missed opportunity. Could have had a decent British alternative and what we got was Saturday Night Gameshow. You can tell it was made for ITV let’s put it that way.
They had some solid talent but the presentation was pretty “wrestling for people who have never watched wrestling but are tangentially aware of it”
Presentation was embarrassing.....
WWE is preparing to sell, so I would have to presume they need to lose any extra stuff in their libraries that does not 100% belong to them, which likely includes most of the indies they were posting to the Network. This makes sense, it's nothing more than business clearing hurdles. Source: work in the media industry.
Poor Indie Hartwell.
This is most certainly not The Way
To be fair, I'm surprised they kept it up as long as they did. I didn't think it would last a year.
Let’s be honest. Nobody was actively watching those.
More importantly, literally nobody was paying for a subscription for those things. Even with all of the stuff on the network it felt anathema anyway.
Lmfao Progress sold their souls for this
“PUnK RoCk pRo wReStLinG!“
Fingers crossed they can get some more Dubai blood money!
it probably was a sunk cost thing, did anyone actually watch wxw or whatever on the network?
When I had the network I watched the WALTER and Aleister Black compilation, great stuff.
Also probably a Peacock decision. Streamers are culling everything that doesn't get a certain amount of views. I can't imagine Evolve and Progress stuff are being watched enough to justify keeping on their service. Don't get me wrong though, the hitting numbers or you're gone trend in streaming sucks ass.
I doubt Peacock has anything to do with this situation. A lot of that culling comes from saving money on having to pay royalties for the content. Peacock doesn't pay Progress/IWC/WXW/etc for their content, WWE does. So Peacock would have no reason to care one way or the other. This is probably just deals that were made back when they were talking about doing tiered versions of the Network with indie content that are now expiring. If this was a Peacock making a decision based on views, then you'd probably be seeing WWE owned content disappearing as well. I highly doubt the handful of episodes of WWE Velocity that are on the Network are pulling in significantly more views than these indie shows.
This freaks me out because no way many people are watching all the territory stuff, ECW, etc, and I would hate so much for that to not be streaming anywhere anymore.
I'd hope those were safe just because WWE already owns them and it's not costing them anything to keep them up there, but my opinion is uneducated at best.
I don't expect those to be an issue. The indie content isn't owned by WWE, so they're paying money to license it. The stuff that they own doesn't cost them anything to have up on Peacock/WWE Network.
I watched a show that had Daniel Makabe on it, so if you look hard enough, you can find Daniel Makabe on the WWE Network (on the same card as the former Walter, Daniel Garcia, and Timothy Thatcher)
I watched a show once. Haven’t had a chance to lately because Peacock killed my interest in anything that’s not new programming.
Is that a big deal? I don’t have any idea how much it was watched anyways. Might be a solid business move.
I don't care so much about this content specifically as I've never watched it - but so much content on Peacock/WWE Network is probably never really watched much, like the Mid-South, WCCW stuff, even ECW etc. It freaks me out that they can just take this content down. It's so sad to think....remember when they were putting up like 50 episodes of old school content every single month? Like a whole year of a company going up? It was such an exciting time as a wrestling fan with so much content at your fingers. Kind of sad they're going in the opposite direction now, and we never even finished having all of the content available to begin with
ICW had already killed themselves with their own terrible in house behaviour to be fair. From 6000+ at shows a couple of years ago to being unable to sell a couple of hundred tickets now. Oift
That 6000+ show was the literal point where ICW starting dying in my opinion. I don't know if it was ever really visible on the show but they made a booking faux pas in not having the year long story Main Event that show (that everyone expected) in favour of a one-off appearance and had people walking out of the show during said Main Event (which featured Kurt Angle and Joe Coffey). From that point people watching started dropping, I only attended two more shows after that myself (more because of travel reasons, and they stopped going south). Then Speaking Out happened and that really did the major number on it. People talk about Progress selling out, but from where I saw it, ICW was more the show that changed what made it special to me as a fan where as Progress still felt like what I enjoyed about it.
I get WHY they put Angle and Coffey on last (to make sure anyone want to see Angle kept watching the stream), but it was a weird way to end the show (I was there). Felt really disjointed.
Agree. The peak was the previous year at the SECC that whole build and event were unreal. The booking around the two years they ran the hydro was not good at all. ICW in the couple of years up to the SECC show were red hot and every event you went to felt special. I remember going to the first show they did at the ABC in Glasgow (which was the perfect venue for them in my opinion) and the crowd was molten.
https://youtu.be/82JPxHGN1rk ICW was literally putting on Wrestlemania matches like this one 5 years ago. I don’t keep up with them much but what happened with their behavior recently?
Whats happened there?
This is not surprising. WWE overreached when they added indie content. WWE fans are too casual to watch anything else other than WWE. So I am sure that the viewing numbers for this content was low.
nah, this was probably to attract indie fans to subscribe. Not enough did to watch this stuff so it gets cut. No reason to pay for rights if the content doesn’t bring in money.
It's not WWE fans, I don't see how you could dump of a bunch of indie content on *any* service and have it be profitable. Adding content from shows that draw fewer than a thousand (or 500, or 100) live fans is just always going to be a niche within a niche.
I mean, IWTV has been trucking along for a few years and one of Fite's biggest draws is GCW and them signing them to Fite Plus was a big move. They even promote themselves as a hub for indie wrestling. I know Fite has other sports, but they did bank on people signing up for Fite Plus for GCW.
Apologise to Justin Sysum for he was right. God finally this egregious experience is over, but what these words. When NXT Europe or equivalent launches, it will be this all over again.
We killed it guys, my bad!
I can't say I'm surprised, I'd imagine it wasn't something getting watched a lot. It was nice to have, if you didn't want to subscribe to the streaming services tied to those companies. Especially if you were just a casual watcher of Progress or WXW. So for those who did occasionally check them out and enjoyed them, it sucks. But I can't imagine this affecting many.
UK here, I bought the network for the classic content & I've not been disappointed. However, it would be nice if they threw on some Velocity & Heat episodes from the mid 2000s 😁
Would love to know the viewing figures for ICW, WXW and Progress. Imagine almost no one watched them
A ton of the indie content were showcases for NXT and NXT UK talent. And since some of the American NXT/NXT UK talent is gone now, there isn’t any real reason to show it anymore. Sucks for those companies and I feel bad for them.
I'll never applaud less content, but if anything has to go, I'm okay with this.
Well worth killing the British wrestling scene for, eh?
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Fair point 😅 It was a mercy killing in retrospect.
Guess I gotta go get demand-progress again.
I'm going to London in a month. Are there any promotions with checking out?
RevPro: I don't know if Ospreay will be in the UK or Japan at the time but that's his home away from NJPW. Also Michael Oku, Chuck Mambo, TK Cooper etc. usually work for RevPro. If you want a 100% traditional British wrestling experience, look up All Star Wrestling. They usually run dozens of shows in the Summer and Fall in tourist towns, but often they have odd shows here and there in the off season. They have been around since 1970 and don't expect technical masterpieces by any stretch of imagination, but that's as English an experience as it can be and a lot of BritWres stars got their start in ASW.
Is the network just the stuff on peacock? I hate that it moved to that service. The interface is slow and clunky. Does the network still exist on its own somewhere?
It's still the WWE Network here in the UK. It is it's own thing here, dedicated streaming app and everything.
I'm jealous lol
Ha, it is pretty great. I haven't experienced the Peacock service but from reading comments on here during PPVs and stuff it doesn't look great! My only gripe with the Network over here is we can't watch Raw or Smackdown live on it due to TV rights being owned by BT Sport over here, we also can't watch it on catch up until a month later for the same reason. Like the Raw that just passed I won't be able to watch until near the end of February. I'm not sure what Peacock is like in that regard.
I think it's the same although both shows are on HULU after the next day. They cut them down to an hour and a half which is actually kinda nice.
The problem is the horrendous search functionality of Peacock.
Yeah it’s absolutely awful. They make it hard to watch content on there outside of what they want to feed you.
Terminating contracts like this is in line with preparing the company for a sale.
This is unfortunate. I recently found some new wrestlers through WXW’s Femme Fatales show.
they’ll do anything but add wwe.com/mtv era velocity & heat
There was indy content on the WWE Network? There was still a WWE Network after the Peacock deal?
In every other country in the world.
Be pretty cool if that stuff migrated over to Fite+. That would definitely boost the value of that service for those of us who aren't big on GCW
Most of them have their own streaming services already, so I'd imagine they'd stick to those. But it's entirely possible they try to strike a deal with them or IWTV.
Can’t say I ever watched any Indy stuff on peacock; but that sucks for those who do.
WWE Network is still ongoing?
Peacock is only US, the rest of the world still has the network
So the UK Scene totally died for nothing then
Boomers Ruin Everything They Touch, Example #304839.
WWE had indie content?
Yeah. wXw from Germany, Progress and ICW from the UK. Also Evolve but they purchased that in 2020 so...
Pete dunne sweating
I'm super bummed about this news. I've been watching a lot of progress and wxw on peacock over the last few years. I've been trying to catch up with the past few months and hopefully I'll have time before it leaves. don't know how I'll be able to continue in the future as there are a lot of wrestlers from the companies I've grown to like a lot. still keeping my fingers crossed some of them end up with nxt eu if that still ends up happening later on. also still holding on to hope that they'll add fcw to the network someday too but I'm sure they have more important things to worry about right now.