The first four episodes of WWE's women's tournament, the Mae Young Classic, will be available to binge watch on Monday morning at 9 am est.
Last year, WWE's similar tournament, the Cruiserweight Classic, was released differently--one episode per week, every Wednesday after NXT throughout the summer.
Many have been wondering why the alteration in release methods, but Triple H detailed the reasoning for the change in a recent interview with NBC Sports.
“Well, I think for us it’s an experiment in that our fanbase skews fairly young. Our fans sort of over index in their digital use. We wanted to see where our fans would net out in what they really like. There’s something in the world right now, like you take Netflix for example, they take a season of a new show and put it up at one time because people like to binge watch.
House of Cards or whatever comes out … I don’t watch any TV so I’m going to get into uncomfortable realm right now (laughs) … those shows come out at once and you get people that just sit home on a weekend and watch the whole season.
We found that while people were uber-interested in the Cruiserweight Classic, that as it started to get into the later episodes, even though the matches were getting more important and the stars were getting bigger and you were learning more and more about them, the component of when it aired got less and less important and as opposed to appointment watching, they were just watching it whenever they wanted. They transitioned from the air dates to the VOD.
This is an attempt by us to see what they prefer. We’re going to do the bracketology show, put it out and then we’re going to drop those first four episodes, which is the first round and you can binge watch that first round and then that next week you’re going to get the next batch of episodes and then that takes you to the finals the following week.
Everybody is busy and things creep into your life and you might be like ‘I can’t watch this episode today’, but now you can sit home on a Saturday, give yourself four hours and you can watch the first round. Or you can watch two hours here and two hours there, whenever you want to. We think that’s important because that’s how people are watching television now. The world is shifting.
Appointment television, unless something is live and you feel like you can’t miss it because everybody is going to be talking about it, doesn’t really exist anymore. People want to watch when they want to watch it. I don’t know if you have kids (I don’t), my kids almost anything other than something live that they know is happening at that time, can’t understand why they have to watch something at a certain time. Trying to explain actual television to them is a difficult task.”
The final match of the Mae Young Classic will be broadcast live on the WWE Network on September 12 after SmackDown in Las Vegas.
