Tag: spike tv

November 6, 2007 Observer Newsletter: WWE Cyber Sunday recap, UFC extends deal with Spike TV

Posted on by Dave Meltzer

WWE’s annual Cyber Sunday show has more intrigue than a normal PPV event, largely because fans vote for stipulations and matches. Usually they are predictable, and WWE heavily pushes viewers to vote a certain way. But that’s no guarantee they will.

The 10/28 show at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC, drew a nearly full house of about 14,000 fans, and while there were no huge angles, surprises or title changes, it was an overall good show paced by three strong matches that finished. Even though the strongest hype was for Randy Orton vs. Shawn Michaels and the Raw title match most often goes last, because the Smackdown match was having a clean finish, it was Batista pinning Undertaker clean after three Batista bombs. On Smackdown the past few weeks, they pushed the storyline that Batista had never pinned The Undertaker, and by doing so, giving him the clean win seemed to build a rematch.

Subscribers can read this issue here.

September 21, 2005 Observer Newsletter: Spike & WWE counterprogram one another, TNA Unbreakable

Posted on by Dave Meltzer

The battle of 10/3 between Spike TV and the USA Network has heated up even more.

USA announced on 9/13 that it would now have more than four straight hours of WWE programming the first night. To make it clear that both USA and WWE do consider the UFC as competition, they have moved the start time of Raw to 7:55 p.m., getting a five minute jump on the UFC Unleashed show that will serve as a pre-game show to the two-hour live special that begins at 9 p.m. In addition, WWE will have a fourth hour, scheduled to start whenever the Raw/ They should have let me know the now then called “Raw Exposed: WWE’s 10 Greatest Moments.” 

This show is being done to keep UFC and Spike from being the beneficiary of all the hotshot programming, as when Raw ended, Ultimate Fighter would begin, and the regular Raw viewers, particularly those between 18-34 (more than 70% of some good nights) have stayed tuned to see Ultimate Fighter. The idea is not to allow both Raw & the live UFC special to end simultaneously and feed Spike a good rating.

Subscribers can read this issue here

Impact Wrestling finds a new home on TV in the UK

Posted on by Dave Meltzer

Impact Wrestling announced a new television deal in the United Kingdom today with Spike U.K., a two-year-old station in the market that also airs Bellator.

Spike U.K. airs a lot of Spike TV programming as well as some shows from parent Ch. 5 in the U.K.

The station broadcasts in the U.K. and Ireland. Only a handful of shows in the history of the station have done 200,000 viewers.

The deal goes into effect in the spring, and will air Impact every week, as well as monthly live and taped PPVs. TNA Xplosion will air on the smaller My5.

Impact will air on Friday nights, the night after the show debuts in the U.S. and Canada.

Impact had been out of the U.K. since being canceled by Challenge TV. Its ratings had declined greatly on the station prior to being dropped. Impact had often had more viewers than Raw or SmackDown in the U.K. in the past, but that’s misleading since Challenge was available in far more homes than Sky.