With just over a month to go before Raw moves to Netflix, WWE and Netflix executives held a media event on Tuesday.
The event took place from Netflix headquarters in California and included a discussion with representatives from both companies. During the panel, WWE President Nick Khan confirmed that there are no plans to change Raw’s advertiser rating for it to become an edgier show on Netflix. It will remain family-friendly content.
“We’re not changing the rating of our programming. So there’s some online chatter about, ‘Oh, it’s going to be R-rated, or for us old folks, X-rated.’ That’s definitely not happening,” Khan said. “It’s family-friendly, multi-generational, advertiser-friendly programming. It’s going to stay that way. I would look for more global flair, especially as the relationship continues to develop. Countries outside of the United States are as important to us as the United States is. So we have certain targeted countries that are priorities for Netflix. They’re priorities for us. You’re going to see more of that. I think that’s the way you’ll see a bit of a difference.”
Raw’s Netflix premiere is taking place from the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California on January 6. There is still no confirmation on whether it will be a two-hour or three-hour show on Netflix — or if Raw will have a more flexible format without the constraints of traditional television. Paul “Triple H” Levesque joked that he will let everyone know on January 6 what Raw’s format is.
Despite the buffering issues that the streaming service experienced for its Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria says they are ready for WWE’s arrival.
“Whenever we do live events, we want it to go smoothly for every single one of our members. That’s really important — also, to put it in perspective, it was 65 million concurrent streams [for Paul vs. Tyson], right? It was a very successful night. A lot of people [watched], the scale was very big, which is great. There’s a lot of interest in it,” Bajaria said.
“We expected a big number, for sure. It was a big number. But again, you don’t know, and you can’t learn these things until you do them so you take a big swing. Our teams and our engineers are amazing, moved super quickly, and stabilized it, and many of the members had it back up and running pretty quickly. But we learn from those things. And we’ve all obviously done a lot of stuff to learn and get ready for the NFL and Beyonce at halftime and so we’re totally ready and excited for WWE.”
Raw is the only weekly WWE programming that will air on Netflix in the United States, but international markets are getting a more expansive array of WWE content. Khan addressed whether PLEs could move to Netflix in the U.S. when WWE’s deal with Peacock is up.
“Peacock is our incumbent partner, and we’re always going to respect our incumbent’s rights in the relationship we have there,” he said. “So we’ll have those conversations with them in 2025 and we’ll see what shakes up.”
Becky Lynch — who has been on hiatus from WWE since May but is expected to be back soon — was among the wrestlers who attended the media event at Netflix headquarters. Seth Rollins, Cody Rhodes, CM Punk, Bianca Belair, Liv Morgan, Rey Mysterio, The Miz, and Rhea Ripley were also there.
