Thursday, April 03, 2014

WWE Network

The World Wrestling Federation Entertainment company recently put out what boils down to being their own version of Netflix. Except instead of old movies and television shows they have old wrestling pay per views and old wrestling television shows. WWE bought up the WCW and ECW libraries a while ago so they've got all the PPVs from all three big wrestling federations from when I was a kid. They're also focusing on putting out a bunch of new content like Netflix does, in particular all of the new PPVs are going to be streamed live on the WWE Network. This has made some cable companies pretty bitter since a lot of the demand for the $60 PPVs has gone away now that people can pay $10 per month and get all of them. 1/6th the cost, no hassle with the cable company, and a bunch of other free stuff on top? I have to imagine a lot of people look at that deal and have a hard time saying no.

If they live in the US, anyway. The service is only available in the US and they don't expect to have it up in Canada for a year. I hate this sort of thing. I don't understand the need, in this day and age, to have restrictions based on where one lives. I have to imagine it's a copyright law issue of some kind because those laws are stupidly outdated. It makes me sad because Wrestlemania is this weekend and I wanted to give it a watch. A quick search on Rogers website doesn't even turn up anything about it, so I can't tell if I could even order it the 'old' way.

Anyway... I did some internet searching of other varieties and it turns out I actually live in Kentucky, which is in the US. Who knew? My computer is still in Canada though, but I found a free trial of an IP converter thingy so now it's down in the US somewhere too... The last couple of days while making food and eating I've been watching old Royal Rumble matches. It's pretty sweet, I have to say!

Wrestlemania is the first PPV they're running on the Network so I do fear it'll go wrong in some way. Probably server overload as more people try to watch than they're ready to handle. The claim is it'll be starting at 7pm on Sunday. If anyone wants to risk that it works and come on down to Kentucky to watch you're welcome to; if it's busted then I'll hopefully just end up watching it at 3am or something.

1 comment:

Mark Cook said...

You can order it on wwe.com and on Rogers - I'm not exactly sure what the deal is or why they don't make it more obvious on their website, but they work with Viewer's Choice PPV (viewerschoice.ca) to manage PPV material for them.