5 Ways To Improve The WWE Network

For a while after its debut, the WWE Network seemed like nothing more than a cheap joke that WWE would play on the audience. You know things are bad when you can actually buy a t-shirt on WWE's online store that literally just says $9.99. Guess how much it costs...

Over time, however, it has become a vital arrow in any wrestling fan’s quiver. With weekly episodes of NXT, including Takeover events, original documentaries, reality shows and every Pay-Per-View on the calendar, it has really come into its own as the Netflix of pro wrestling.

The fact that WrestleMania and almost every event from the biggest week in wrestling is aired on the network is worth the price of admission alone, in my opinion. The amount of money you save is nothing to laugh about, and they have hundreds and hundreds of hours of content, both old and new, to keep even the most contrasting of wrestling fans satisfied.

However, there are a number of things that could be done, from both a user-experience and programming standpoint, which could make the WWE Network even better, and convince more people to fork over the $9.99-a-month subscription fee. Let’s take a look!

If you know exactly what you want to watch, the search bar is supposed to be very useful, but sometimes the results it generates are completely random. In order to back this up, I decided to search ‘WrestleMania 25’, a simple enough event that took place in 2009, which featured Triple H battling Randy Orton for the WWE Championship in the main event.

While I got what I was looking for after a bit of scrolling, the first results had nothing to do with what I wanted. The first was an episode of Monday Night Raw from February 4th 2013, the second was a first look at Daniel Bryan’s ‘Just Say Yes! Yes! Yes!’ documentary and the third was yet another episode of Raw from 2013. The results were random, and work could be done to improve it.

They could maybe even add a filter for users to input the year they’re looking for. It’s easy to just go to Pay-Per-Views, find WrestleMania, search 2009 and let that be that, but the search bar is there for a reason, so you’d expect it to work the way it’s supposed to.

A filter would also come in handy for searching a particular wrestler, as the results given to you from a simple search for ‘John Cena’ or ‘Seth Rollins’ are completely random. Some people might like it this way, but it seems a bit sloppy to me, and I would prefer to be able to search specific superstars by year, show or match-type. Big matches should also be presented first, rather than miniscule ones.