Earlier this week, WWE’s Chief Financial Officer George Barrios attended the Citi Global Consumer Conference to discuss the WWE business.
Barrios talked how WWE “launched the pay-per-view business” with WrestleMania I and now they are going to”re-imagine” the same business with the WWE Network.
“We are going to take 11 of our 12 pay-per-views – Wrestlemania will continue to be a pay-per-view – and move it to a subscription network,” Barrios said.
The CFO listed the price between $12.99 to $14.99 a month for the network, making their PPV broadcasts more available to people because as he said, today’s pay-per-views are “pretty expensive…and frankly we know that kind of narrow caps our audience because of the high price point.”
Barrios said the price will be easy to afford and they have received a lot of good feedback from their research. The company plans to produce new shows from their 100,000+ hours of library footage as well as airing classic shows.
“At two million subscribers on a steady state basis, it would be fairly transformational for WWE,” Barrios said, saying that that would bring in the range of $50 million to $100 million incrementally.
“At 3 million to 4 million subscribers it really changes the business completely. So there is a lot of focus within the company on bringing this to fruition.”
