WWE’s decision to move back to Live TV came as a surprise to many and now a new report from F4Wonline has provided some update on the situation.
According to the site, WWE had planned a lengthy set of tapings from April 10th where they planned to tape enough content to last them for a month.
However, as the company was taping this past Friday’s SmackDown and 205 Live episodes, Vince McMahon changed the plans and he decided that he wanted to keep the shows “as close to live as soon as possible.”
While not confirmed, the possible reason behind this move from the company is their TV contracts with NBC Universal and Fox network, which allows them only a certain number of taped episodes per year.
For NBC Universal, the number of allowed taped Raw episodes is three and doing any more taped shows will give the companies ground to change the deals.
Since WWE has cancelled all their live events and they are not making any money through ticket sales either, their main source of revenue is their TV contracts.
The TV channels are also bringing in reduced revenues due to the coronavirus pandemic and the company does not want to give them an opportunity to change their minds about the TV deals.
Though it was also noted that wrestling is one of the few live programmings on TV right now and the networks also need them, so it’s highly unlikely that they will cut it off from their channels altogether.
