Kemo
10-25-2016, 09:43 PM
On Monday, as word leaked about the FloSlam announcement and after FloSports officially announced the launch of said new streaming service, Wrestling Observer editor Dave Meltzer was fielding questions about the story on his website’s subscribers-only message board. As sometimes happens, he broke a bit of news in the forum discussion, and these are the key takeaways:
Pro Wrestling Guerrilla refused to even talk to Flo and “turned them down flat without a conversation.” (PWG is one of the few promotions that still does strong DVD sales, and not doing streaming allows them more flexibility in matchmaking, like booking Evolve and ROH wrestlers in the same matches)
WWE is a silent partner in FloSports with “zero influence” per the deal the company agreed to when signing on as an investor.
“WWE is not happy that the price value has just skyrocketed (and that word is not exaggerated) if they want to get into the indie content game, and they obviously did based on their surveys.”
It appears that WWE had no idea that this was coming, which is fascinating because there had been whispers about this for months. It had even come up publicly on the forum for the popular Voices of Wrestling podcast, where noted Twitter troublemaker/news breaker “rovert” brought it up a few weeks ago:
pic.twitter.com/Ib7FwQgMQG
— rovert (@SoDuTw) October 24, 2016
If WWE didn’t know and has no direct involvement, then that also means that the company didn’t steer WWN/Evolve towards Flo, which you might think at first glance. Until WWE put out that survey about indie wrestling on a new tier of WWE Network, there wasn't no real buzz about WWE doing it themselves on the Network, so Flo most likely didn’t know about those plans, either. That’s not nearly as strange as WWE not knowing, though.
It’s a very good time to be an indie promoter with buzz right now, even if the underlying politics of any potential bidding war are very strange, to say the least.
Pro Wrestling Guerrilla refused to even talk to Flo and “turned them down flat without a conversation.” (PWG is one of the few promotions that still does strong DVD sales, and not doing streaming allows them more flexibility in matchmaking, like booking Evolve and ROH wrestlers in the same matches)
WWE is a silent partner in FloSports with “zero influence” per the deal the company agreed to when signing on as an investor.
“WWE is not happy that the price value has just skyrocketed (and that word is not exaggerated) if they want to get into the indie content game, and they obviously did based on their surveys.”
It appears that WWE had no idea that this was coming, which is fascinating because there had been whispers about this for months. It had even come up publicly on the forum for the popular Voices of Wrestling podcast, where noted Twitter troublemaker/news breaker “rovert” brought it up a few weeks ago:
pic.twitter.com/Ib7FwQgMQG
— rovert (@SoDuTw) October 24, 2016
If WWE didn’t know and has no direct involvement, then that also means that the company didn’t steer WWN/Evolve towards Flo, which you might think at first glance. Until WWE put out that survey about indie wrestling on a new tier of WWE Network, there wasn't no real buzz about WWE doing it themselves on the Network, so Flo most likely didn’t know about those plans, either. That’s not nearly as strange as WWE not knowing, though.
It’s a very good time to be an indie promoter with buzz right now, even if the underlying politics of any potential bidding war are very strange, to say the least.