Variety ran a story today about the success of WWE Monday Night Raw since it moved to Netflix in January, pointing out that the July 7 episode of the show marked the 27th straight week that Raw has cracked Netflix's Top 10 global list. The show has averaged almost 3 million views and 6.3 million hours viewed per week.
Gabe Spitzer, Netflix's Vice President of Sports had this to say about WWE Raw on the streaming platform:
"It’s everything we could have hoped for and more. We knew going in that we’re not going to change WWE. It was more, how can we add to it in small ways, and that’s what we’ve seen so far."
"[WWE’s] distribution has been pretty fragmented up to this point, and the hope was ‘Let’s combine the power of what you guys do with the power of what we do with our global distribution, and get our marketing teams together … and try to lift this."
The story also further touched on Spitzer's comment on programming being fragmented by pointing out that domestically, WWE Smackdown is still on the USA Network while the weekly NXT show runs on the CW Network and premium live events stream on Peacock. Meanwhile internationally, everything is on Netflix since January and the story suggested that once WWE's deal with Peacock expires in 2026, there are rumors that they will move content over to Netflix as a one-stop shop. Spitzer spoke on Netflix's strategy when it comes to airing live sports programming:
"For us, it’s still early stages. We want things that are going to create global conversation. And I think with WWE, we already know they have that. … So we’ll continue to have conversations with the leagues that have rights coming up."
