Last year, SuperSport and the WWE extended their partnership with the world's biggest wrestling promotion which would see the WWE Network fold under Showmax as seen in Indonesia, Phillipines, Australia and India which have all terminated the brand.
SuperSport would continue to offer Raw, SmackDown, NXT and premium live PPVs across their platforms. As for the WWE Channel, that's expected to continue running on channel 128 but would it be shocking if it didn't considering it was never mentioned earlier.
Vince McMahon, the founder of WWE has been exploring a potential sale of the brand for several months and had recieved a number of potential buyers at the time including Comcast (NBCUniversal), Disney, Amazon and the Saudis apparently.
If you view this from a logical perspective, I can see why this deal was put on hold. If you take to account, the mentioned potential buyers at the time such as Disney. They probably wouldn't want to bundle WWE on Showmax especially if Disney+ already exists.
Although a buyer has yet to be announced, I can see imagine how WWE would operate under the Disney tile. They'd probably scrap SuperSport's WWE and merge it with ESPN meaning in order to view further content particularly archived you'd need ESPN+.
As mentioned, Showmax's deal with WWE does come off as suspicious if you take the following to account:
WWE® (NYSE: WWE) and MultiChoice today announced a major broadcast partnership that will see Showmax – the leading streaming service available in the region – become the new home of WWE Network in Africa.
The partnership incorporates all WWE Premium Live Events, including WrestleMania®, as well as WWE Network’s vast library of original and archived programming available to stream on-demand.
Additionally, SuperSport, the sport broadcasting subsidiary of video entertainment platform MultiChoice, will continue to broadcast live weekly episodes of Raw®, SmackDown® and NXT® as well as all of WWE’s Premium Live Events in a multi-year extension.
Although, MultiChoice mentions that the WWE Channel would remain onboard I find it hard to believe. Yes this channel brings the consumers and revenue but why not mention such a brand in early press statements when expanding this deal to Showmax.
Even more reasons to suspect the possible demise of channel 128 would be Showmax. Notice how they mention "WWE Network’s vast...archived programming" but SuperSport only references "live weekly episodes of Raw®, SmackDown®...WWE’s Premium Live Events.
Most people grew fond of this channel so maybe WWE Channel would be supplemented by another brand that could fill up the void and probably be WWE savvy but there's always chances that this could be nothing at this point.
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