During a recent edition of his “83 Weeks” podcast, Eric Bischoff discussed the reach of the January 6th premiere episode of WWE RAW on Netflix.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On whether the show could be the most watched wrestling show since the Monday Night Wars: “It is a wild a*s guess. The last time I took a guess, I was off by a ‘mere’ 54 million views, so [laughs] take that for what it’s worth. I think it very well possibly could be. Keep in mind, you know, the biggest markets for professional wrestling — WWE in particular, they’re the ones that have the international footprint for all intents and purposes, for this discussion at least. But a lot of that footprint is overseas. It’s — you know, midnight. It’s two in the morning, it’s six in the morning. So I think over the course of 24 hours? Without question, this will probably be the most-watched episode of professional wrestling ever. But in terms of live, I’m not really sure how big of a footprint we’ll get internationally from the live broadcast.”
On the Netflix era: “You know, one of the things I thought about today is — you know, knowing that we were going to do the show, I was trying to imagine what it’s like to be there as a part of WWE. Not necessarily in the ring or as talent, but just being a part of the company. And fortunately, we — more me than you, because I’m quite a bit older than you are. But you know, in my early 20s, mid 20s, whatever it was, I was around and got — you know, in my fandom, this is before I ever broke into the wrestling industry, I got to be a part of that one really big transition when television kind of left syndication, the territory model, kind of left that behind, and Vince McMahon and WWE went national. That was a seismic shift, to deemphasize syndication and produce a national wrestling show. It was a really important pivot point in the history of the evolution of the industry, and we got to live through that. I got to watch that as a fan and experience that. And tonight, we get to experience another one of those pivot points in the evolution of the wrestling industry as a whole, that being the move to Netflix. So I think this is such an important next step for the industry that I think referring it to anything other than the Netflix era would be underselling it or understating it.”
