Stefanie Sparkleface

Ibuki Hoshi gave birth to her daughter yesterday in Hokkaido. Everything went well, and mother and daughter are both healthy. New grandmother Hamuko Hoshi is overjoyed as well! Hamuko was in Hokkaido today to participate in Yuu Yamagata's self-produced show, so she'll get to see her granddaughter soon. Yuki Mashiro returned to the ring today and showed no ill effects from her injury. She partnered with Misa Kagura and Saran to beat YuuRI, Sumika Yanagawa, and Kirari Wakana when Saran forced Kirari to give up. Mashiro confirmed she will still take on YuuRI at Korakuen next week to challenge for the Infinity title. Mashiro has also been added to tomorrow's Ueno concert collaboration show with Hot Shushu, as a second for Saran to counteract Grizzly Fujitaki's second, Chiitan☆. I suspect that might just be a comedy match. Kyuuri and Mifu Ashida had a leadup to their Triangle Ribbon match next week, with Kyuuri forcing her Cheerbell partner to give up to a modification on a stretch muffler. The third participant in next week's match was recommended by Mio Shirai, and it will be freelancer Kaji Tomato, making his first appearance since 2011. Ice Ribbon has been slowly seeing men added back into the mix for a while now, with Kento Kiryu from Chiharu's C-Selection group wrestling in a dark match at August's Korakuen, but this is the first man to be in a title match since Triple Six's Koju Takeda, masquerading as Lady Koju, back in 2020. Takeda won the Triangle Ribbon away from Ram Kaichow, and promptly lost it right back to her a week later.

Pro wrestling is, has, and forever been full of scumbags, the difference is how much people will forgive if they think that person can punch real good. That's universal, by the way, not just one promotion.

I mentioned this in a previous post, but I think that has more to do with brand loyalty than it does anything else. WWE has a very consistent audience after decades in place, and is also smart about making it so you don't have to watch all their programming. If you're a regular Raw watcher, you rarely if ever need to watch Smackdown or NXT, and if anything relevant to Raw happens on those two shows, they're very smart about doing recaps. That sort of stability builds viewing habits that override a lot of other things. Not only that, but they loaded up the show, with talent from other brands. They didn't do that because they were against AEW, they did that because they were against the NHL, MLB, WNBA, hurricane coverage, et al. If they had ran a regular show, then you probably would've seen a 50-100k loss in viewers. Instead, they drew in fans of other parts of the company by having Jade Cargill, Bianca Belair, A-Town Down Under, and Randy Orton on the show. If you notice, that's all Smackdown talent, so people who just watch Smackdown might have been more intrigued to tune in. AEW doesn't have that sort of brand loyalty, nor do they have a split of shows so they can beef things up from one side to the other. That's why if there is something else more intriguing on, you'll see their live audience dip (or in Tuesday's case, plunge). I'd be willing to bet that the 300k regular viewers they lost from two weeks ago to Tuesday gets made up in DVR watching, because that's the common trend with them when they're moved to another night/timeslot or up against bigger programming. Problem is, DVR numbers aren't as reported as live numbers, so we'll never know, and we're left to assume AEW just magically lost half their audience from one week to the next for unknown reasons.

This thread exists for a reason, so people who don't want to see the business/ratings talk don't have to. If you don't like it that much, ignore it or mark it as read. People will just invent a new thing to doom and gloom about. Most of the people who sowed discontent about WWE's ratings and how they were on the verge of being cancelled instead have moved on to AEW's ratings, and nobody thinks about the alternate methods of viewership. Whenever I see a low rating, I just figure there were other reasons and I'd want to see the DVR numbers before worrying (especially on a busy TV night like Tuesday was), but oh wait, nobody reports those.

I think it's cute. Not $100 cute, but cute nonetheless.

So I used to watch Dynamite as appointment viewing but that ended a couple of years ago. Now I'll watch if it looks like a show I want to see, but for the most part, I watch after the fact at my own pace or read a summary. Where NXT has a benefit is a very staunch built in audience that is very brand loyal to WWE and will watch practically anything with a WWE logo on it ahead of anything else. That's the benefit of WWE being around as long as they have, they have their locked in audience that'll watch live as long as they remain interested. The casuals/non-diehards are going to catch up via YouTube, short videos on social media, and their DVR, but they just have a huge base to pull from.

Plus a win or go home game in the WNBA playoffs to determine who goes to the finals, NHL's opening day... there were a lot of options out there.

The man has a school named after him, that's gotta count for something. Tiger Jeet Singh is for the kids!

Eh she's not speedy. They can't all be Masato Yoshino.

There's a reason why "just asking questions" is called JAQing off, especially with nonsense like that.

Technically with the shine in Pete Dunne's hair, shouldn't he be a futch?

What a second half comeback by Brighton! I might have nervously eaten a candy bar at halftime and I hope that isn't required for all comebacks going forward.

They tried too hard to focus on trying to out-ESPN ESPN on the talk coverage when they could have been buying up rights for international sports (Korean or Japanese baseball, maybe?) and running those games live in the middle of the day so they can capture the market who says ESPN is too talk-heavy. Instead, FS1 really only has utility during college sports seasons, and even then, CBS Sports Network has more games. I see FS1 going the way of NBC Sports Network at some point because they don't really have much else going for them. I work from home, so I do from time to time. And I'm not old! Yet! Pay no attention to my postgrad daughter and my aching hip!

She’s Suzy in her personal life and Eddie in her professional life. She tweeted about it last year.

It could be, but from a market growth and pressure perspective, Tubi is the better option. With the main Fox channel, they only program two hours of prime time per day outside of their sports offerings, so AEW would have to perform strongly (like two million viewers live) before Fox looks for other options. OTA TV is a minefield, and while AEW would be cost effective programming, I’d see them running into the same problems as every other OTA broadcast venture for wrestling. If it’s in consideration for FS1, you have two major problems. First is cable’s shedding of customers, second is that FS1 is a low prestige channel (their highest rated regular show draws in the 200-300K viewer count, and there’s a significant drop from there). Historically, it’s not a good thing to go to a dying channel and hope your show can save it. Personally, I would be focusing on where your market is and where it’s shifting towards. Things like Tubi, Pluto, and YouTube are big, and they have a huge chunk of the younger market. Being on those platforms would be smart business.

Is the canal played by Eddie Izzard?

Lemme throw one out there for you… Fox owns Tubi and has been looking to up their sports content. They showed a lot of World Baseball Classic, La Liga, and NBA G League games on there, and were also the archive for the men’s World Cup a couple of years ago. I wouldn’t discount that negotiations with Fox are for there, and I’d actually say that’s a bigger deal because Tubi’s userbase has been steadily growing (I think I saw that they were pushing 80 million regular users?). A lot of content providers are getting behind FAST networks like Tubi and Pluto and seeing them as a more viable option. I’m not saying that they couldn’t be in the running for network TV, but I would say Tubi would be a pretty marvelous option, especially if you’re trying to capture the 18-29 market that watches programming on their laptop or phone, not a TV.

We need more intelligent speedboat cop(?) shows anyway.

No, that's on Peacock. (What? Don't look at me like that.)

I also wonder if they're figuring out the logistics. If the goal was to do a UFC on ESPN+ sort of deal, Max hasn't had that before. I bet that's a big part of the reason why B/R Live has been sunset, to bring those people into the fold for Max and see what they can make work. (Ha! B/R Live, actually working! I amuse myself.)

I would not be surprised if the Fite/Triller partnership comes to an end once Max is up in all areas. The UK is the big standout since they can't launch there until 2026 when their deal with Sky ends, IIRC, but if WBD plans on having things stream on Max, then a competing product would end wherever possible. Unless, of course, WBD totally bungled it. Considering they're WBD and they've bungled nearly everything in the last three years, that's entirely possible!

Putting on my old TV production hat, I think the more likely scenario is that the PIPs will be dropped in favor of traditional commercial breaks on cable and ad-supported Max, and "your program is in break" title cards for ad-free Max. That's a perfect split point for commercial insertion in the archive on the ad-supported tier.

To add, $150m is a pretty reasonable buy with the Max component in play. Streaming CPMs are double (at minimum) what cable CPMs are, so the return on investment should line up with that level of buy. I’m interested to see what the PPV info ends up being.

If the NBA on Max is an example, it’ll be a simulcast of the feeds on TBS/TNT, so whatever cable viewers see is what people on Max see. Archive is an interesting question since Max doesn’t archive NBA games.