ESPN Exec Confirms There Is ‘Minimum Threshold’ Of WWE PLEs That Must Be Simulcast On New ESPN Service & Linear TV

Information about simulcasts for WWE-ESPN events.

Starting on September 20th, WWE’s Premium Live Events will be airing on ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer service. The five-year deal between the two entities will kick off with the Wrestlepalooza PLE in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The first-ever WWE-ESPN media call took place, and fielding questions were Matt Kenny, ESPN Vice President of Programming and Acquisitions, and John Lasker, Senior Vice President of ESPN+.

Kenny was asked a question about how ESPN decides which portions of WWE PLEs are going to be simulcast on the new streaming service and on linear television. He confirmed that there are provisions that they have to simulcast a ‘minimum threshold’ of events.

“Yeah, it’s a great question. I mentioned the collaboration between us and WWE. So I think the first step is we work with our content strategy team to figure out that opportunities exist. This may be a little inside the ropes a bit, but, I think it’s good context so it starts with us figuring out where are we. As you can appreciate, given our portfolio of rights, we have a lot of commitments, and so then, it’s once we get a sense of what we could do, it’s working with the WWE on what that looks like, and so, we will get into that with them.

There is a minimum threshold (of WWE PLEs that have to be shown on ESPN linear TV), that we have to hit, and at the same time, we understand that, look, maybe doing it more would be beneficial, maybe not and so, we’re still so early in all this, that I think the most important aspect of the simulcast piece is how do we use our mega influence? If you think about ESPN as a funnel, how do we get as many people into the funnel as people? And ultimately, that accrues benefit to the diehard WWE fan, and then also expanding the audience and exposing more and more people to the WWE which we want to do. Audience expansion is a big priority for our company. We wanna get younger, we wanna get more diverse. We want better gender diversity on our platforms. All of these things, we want to do, and so, we believe WWE is a big part of that solution as we move forward here in our new direct-to-consumer world.”

Full written coverage of the media call is up on the Fightful site. We’ll have audio and written coverage of WWE’s Wrestlepalooza PLE on 9/20.

If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the original source with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.