Triple H. during the Wrestlemania 41 in the Allegian Stadium on April 19, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Georgiana Dallas | WWE | Getty pictures
The WWE comes to ESPN.
The Disney-Controlled sports and entertainment business pays an average of 325 million US dollars a year for five years of the US rights of the US live events, including Wrestlemania, the Royal Rumble and Summerslam. WWE and ESPN spokesman rejected a comment.
Peacock from NBCuniversal had previously paid 180 million US dollars a year for the package in five years, so two people familiar with the matter.
All ten Premium live events of the WWE per year will stream at the US Select events on the direct-to-consumer platform of $ 29.99 per month.
Disney reported a quarterly profit on Wednesday, which resulted in a domestic ESPN turnover by 1% to 3.93 billion US dollars.
The WWE and ESPN have been strategically brought together in recent years, said, said TKO group President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Shapiro in an interview. TKO is the controlling owner of WWE. Shapiro itself was top manager at ESPN in the early 2000s.
“This is our fate in many ways,” said Shapiro. “If you want to expand the audience, our fan base, the passion in the vicinity of WWE and grow at a really important national level, you cannot do that because it refers to the sports world without working with ESPN.”
The chairman of ESPN, Jimmy Pitaro, said he was interested in the event package, even if ESPN would not be about to debut his new streaming service. Adding the events without an additional fee for subscribers to the digital product helps to reduce emigration for professional wrestling and to expand ESPN beyond traditional sports.
“Our place was built as an entertainment and sports programing network,” said Pitaro, referring to the literal meaning of the acronym “ESPN”. “This is a fantastic way for us to expand our audience. It is younger, it is more diverse and it is more female than what we see at the network level.”
Thirty-eight percent of the WWE audience are women, noted WWE President Nick Khan. About 50% of the people who take part in WWE live events come with children, he said in an interview.
“It is a multi -reverberate look at and we think ESPN is a multi -coding observation,” said Khan.
In 2024, WWE signed a 10-year contract of $ 5 billion Netflix To stream “raw” every Monday evening this year. Netflix will continue to stream Marquee WWE event outside the USA
“Smackdown”, which is broadcast on Fridays in the USA network, will continue to stream on Peacock. According to people who are familiar with the matter, this deal runs off in 2029.
Disclosure: Comcast has NBCUNIERSAL, the parent company of CNBC and USA Network.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that ESPN has the rights for the streams of WWE Premium Live events in the USA that have these rights outside of the USA