10 Things WWE Are Secretly Telling Fans About Their Future
4. Meet The New Boss...
NXT Arrival aired in 2014 as a tester of sorts for both the WWE Network's live-streaming capabilities and the audience's thirst for seeing developmental prospects finally being used as bonafide stars. It's hard to imagine the empty-arena-and-posters aesthetic of Florida Championship Wrestling looking the part on an over-the-top streaming service should one have launched a decade earlier, but much of the changes were rung in by the first man on the aforementioned Full Sail show.
Triple H's first major public steps towards the office space occupied by Vince McMahon inside Titan Tower were taken on that night. He was owning his role as the creator of much of what fans were about to watch - many for the very first time. It was a relatively risk-free dry run for 'The Game' too. Even to this day, NXT is a money-loser, but principle thinking of it as a project justifies its existence beyond the red ink.
Optimistically, if NXT is a reflection of how he views wrestling, the future of WWE's television output is extremely different to that of its recent past. Realistically (and assuming Vince McMahon, at 73, still intends to run the company for another 50 years or so), it may not be quite that straightforward.
Early signs offer a little of both...