10 Alarming Signs Over The Future Of The Pro Wrestling Industry

In 2022, the wrestling and television industry share something of a symbiotic relationship.

The TV industry needs wrestling because it is considered to be a DVR-proof property closer to sport than drama in consumer viewing habits - which is ironic, given how long Vince McMahon spent on a crusade attempting to market WWE as almost the exact opposite. Sport is a dying industry's shield against the rise of streaming services, which - thus far - have been unable to tap into that market.

In turn, wrestling needs television because it doesn't exist without television. Were that rights fee revenue to suddenly disappear, it couldn't exist as a live event medium streamed on YouTube. The expenses are too extravagant; both AEW and WWE would near total collapse.

Cable TV is dying slowly, and while it will take years and years to pass, the viewership slump is becoming exponential.

Cable TV is expensive. Writing as a parent of two, young children cannot even fathom that they have to wait for something they like to appear on the telly. Their viewership habits are being shaped now by how much easier it is for their exhausted guardians to allow them "screen time" after yet another tiring day out. They will watch several episodes of Paw Patrol on a tablet at the age of four and will never know - or want to know - what it's like to wait for something. That's if they even watch a streaming service; YouTube is king among the youth, but wrestling cannot monetise it.

In a major indictment of our times, what was once known as the "idiot box" is somehow too inconvenient.

Of course, in the event of the TV industry actually dying, a streaming service could pick up both AEW and WWE's TV products. Netflix is experimenting with an ad-supported tier. Perhaps streaming - facing its own troubles already - will identically resemble television in the years to come, with the only discernible difference being the means of transmission.

Still, it took decades for the TV industry to actually treat the wrestling audience with a modicum of respect. As Dave Meltzer once wrote, "the negative stigma pro wrestling faces in television is largely something that has plagued the business on a grand scale from the beginning of time".

Streaming bigwigs probably think the same thing; after all, your mates in accounting and construction and software development and teaching and landscape gardening think you're a dork in a state of arrested development for watching it.

With WWE already tied to a Peacock deal, that promotion already has an "in" - but AEW may well have to fight that battle all over again. And if the relationship between streaming and advertisers proves untenable - streaming was embraced originally in no small part because it didn't exist - the WWE Network was not exactly robust proof of concept as a content model. Nowhere near enough consumers were willing to pay for it as was first projected.

Another dreadful monopoly isn't too implausible.