ESPN programming executives Matt Kenny and John Lasker answered questions on Wednesday discussing the launch of ESPN's partnership with WWE and one question that was asked is running WWE Wrestlepalooza on the same day that AEW runs All Out. Here's a transcript of their response:
Q. We've seen in the past WWE's counter programs or competition quite a bit. How did that weigh into the decision to run Wrestlepalooza this weekend or did it? Do you foresee that happening more in the future, or do you kind of want an uninterrupted wrestling market and audience to appeal to?
KENNY: I'll take a stab at that one. For us, we work collaboratively with the WWE on the schedule. In this particular case, many of their events had already been scheduled. Normally in these types of arrangements -- so my team will work on the NBA. We also handle UFC. There's a lengthy process where you work with the partner to identify specific dates, you build out your schedule, so you align in that regard. On some level, WWE's schedule throughout the rest of 2025, there had been a number of dates already on the calendar.
In this particular case, we were just laser focused on launching WWE. We knew we wanted to have a marquee WWE event in September to support the launch of ESPN's Direct-to-Consumer offering, as [Lasker] mentioned before, so it really had less to do with any particular wrestling competition.
In fact, we take a holistic view. We know there's competition everywhere, and certainly in the fall on Saturdays, I don't need to explain to this group, there's no shortage of college football competition throughout the day. We're in the teeth of the football season now. So, we welcome competition. We do take a, hey, game on approach, and we're focused on what we can do in this particular case to super serve WWE and wrestling fans on our platforms.
LASKER: Matt, if I can, I'll just add to this. Everything that Matt said, I 1,000 percent agree with. In addition, we've got an incredible digital ecosystem here and a great product that we just launched on August 21st, which effectively allows us to do what we need to do sort of in -- even with or without competition. This Saturday night, just on our own networks, there's a lot of really great college football games going on, and we get really excited about -- I mentioned the features and functionality we talked about, and one of those is multiview.
So, fans are going to be sitting there on Saturday night and watching Wrestlepalooza and Miami-Florida at the same time and can sort of super in and super out as they see fit or as they wish. Our hope there is it's just going to drive more interest and engagement in the WWE and vice versa, that hopefully WWE fans that are coming to us get to sort of experience and become fans of a lot of the other sort of sports content that we'll be able to present to them.
There's growth and opportunity and sort of excitement in terms of how we serve sports fans irrespective of the sort of competitive set. The more sports fans that are on our platform Saturday night watching various things is good for all of us.
