TNA Wrestling To Start Running Weekly Live TV?
TNA making plans to broadcast its weekly programming live rather than pre-taped?
With the promotion currently doing block TV tapings ahead of time, could it be that TNA Wrestling will start to air live on a weekly basis? Maybe...
Speaking on today's Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer reported that TNA may well be looking to start making its weekly iMPACT! TV show a live broadcast in 2025. And not just that, but at one point the promotion was looking to run these live weekly shows from Full Sail University, the former home of NXT.
As Meltzer detailed:
"One of the things they've been looking at, and this is not gonna happen any time soon, but they wanna go live. The idea is to go live and have, like, a location where they would go every Thursday. And Full Sail University is one of the places they've talked about, which would be really tough because Orlando already has NXT every Tuesday. Before he was ousted, [former TNA President] Scott D'Amore and [Anthem Vice President of Marketing] Lou D'Angeli and [Anthem Chief Corporate Officer] Ed Nordholm went to Full Sail and scouted it out. That's where they wanted to go. The one thing with Full Sail, if you remember, it has a great look for television for a 300, 400-seat building. A lot of the buildings of that size, they don't really look good for TV. And there's some cost savings because you can do what NXT did, where you can have the students work on the shows. It gives them work and it gives them work experience, so there's that. And it's on campus, so you can let the students in free. I thought Full Sail and NXT was a big success. They obviously made the move not to go back after the pandemic for whatever reason, I don't really know. That was talked about. Of course, Scott D'Amore's not there anymore, but Full Sail's still one of the locations they're talking about."
Continuing on, the Observer founder added:
"The idea was, under D'Amore, and it may be delayed, it may not - some of the talent knows about this - would be maybe a few test runs towards the end of the year. The mentality was live [in] 2025. And of course, with D'Amore not there they may also scrap that idea, because it's obviously a lot more expensive to run live every week than to tape in different cities where you can sell some tickets. They don't sell a lot of tickets, but if you're gonna run every single Thursday night at Full Sail University, you're going to have to give those tickets away for free. It's not like people are going to pay for tickets in that city every single Thursday night. It's not happening. But yeah, that was one of the ideas being worked on. I don't know what difference that makes, live versus... I mean, it's more exciting for the wrestlers. I think there'd be a little more talk, but you're still talking the number three promotion and one that doesn't really have that thing that makes people buy a lot of tickets for the show. Number two [AEW] is struggling to sell tickets right now. Would it help its TV ratings to go live for TNA? I don't know."
Meltzer would also note how the Anthem-owned AXS TV station which TNA airs on is a "weak station" whose "upper limits are very low", regardless of whether the programming is live or pre-taped.
Dave would then state:
"As far as buzz on the company, doing live angles and things like that, there's more risk when you're not taping of something botching. But at TNA tapings, they've got a lot of pros working there, and that usually really doesn't happen. I don't really hear about botched-up stuff they've got to retape. It happens but it's not that often. There's more excitement when you're going live, but again, is it worth the extra cost for a company that's trying to keep costs low?"
As alluded to there, one of the reasons Anthem reportedly fired Scott D'Amore last month was due to D'Amore wanting to see more money invested in TNA in order to push the promotion to another level. By all accounts, this was a view not shared by Anthem.
The current schedule of TNA taping several episodes of TV over one weekend is certainly a far cheaper option than having to run a live taping every week, and so one has to question whether Anthem would indeed be looking to pursue this model on a full-time basis in 2025.
After a phenomenal start to the year - the big IMPACT-to-TNA rebrand at Hard to Kill, that PPV weekend in general being a hugely successful one for the company, the arrivals of the likes of Nic Nemeth/Dolph Ziggler and Ash by Elegance/Dana Brooke, Will Ospreay and Josh Alexander putting on an early Match of the Year contender, the TNA return of Kazuchika Okada, the buzz created by Knockouts Champion Jordynne Grace having an impressive outing at WWE Royal Rumble - it's been a rough few weeks for TNA, with the firing of the extremely popular Scott D'Amore causing uncertainty and unrest amongst those within the promotion.
So unhappy were those in TNA, they penned a collective letter to Anthem management to show their frustrations and call for D'Amore to be reinstated. While Anthem is not currently considering D'Amore's return, a meeting between Anthem officials and the TNA roster this past weekend was said to have smoothed things over somewhat, even if many are still keen to see D'Amore return to the fold.
If any quotes from this article are used, please credit Wrestling Observer Radio with an H/T to WhatCulture Wrestling.