[COLUMN] Netflix's WrestleMania May Represent the Future of Streaming | by Darren Mooney

This weekend, Netflix got ready to rumble, hosting the streaming service’s first WrestleMania.

In January 2024, Netflix finalized a deal to become the home of WWE, which is reportedly worth $5bn over ten years to the sports entertainment company. Just a year later, in January 2025, Netflix began streaming the company’s weekly flagship, Raw, globally. Initially indicators are that this deal has been beneficial to both parties. The debut of Raw drew 4.9m live+1 viewers globally on the streaming service.

The Netflix deal is good business for WWE, which has been rocked with scandals tied to former CEO Vince McMahon. However, Netflix offers more than a clean slate. It offers the sports entertainment conglomerate access to a massive global audience. “This is the first time ever that it’s been simplified in a way that, globally, the world over, there’s one place, you know where it is, you know when it’s on and you can just go click on it and get there,” Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque explained of the deal.

Surveys suggest that Netflix truly extends the WWE’s access to potential audiences, indicating that Netflix subscribers are more likely to try Raw now that it is on the service. Netflix’s global infrastructure allows WWE deeper penetration of international markets. The streaming service has invested heavily in boosting engagement with WWE in the United Kingdom. In many overseas markets, events like WrestleMania used to be hidden behind paywalls on specialty broadcasters.

However, the deal also means a lot to Netflix. As WWE President Mark Shapiro explained of the agreement, “Our partnership fundamentally alters and strengthens the media landscape, dramatically expands the reach of WWE, and brings weekly live appointment viewing to Netflix.” Raw and WrestleMania bring something different to Netflix than Adolescence or Stranger Things, and isn’t anything as simple as audience demographics.

For years, the key metric in measuring the success of a streaming service was subscriber growth. The goal was to add as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. This was why companies like Disney+ and Amazon would justify spending frankly absurd amounts of money on recognizable brands in the hope of attracting potential subscribers. This approach was buoyed by the streaming bubble during the pandemic, when people had little to do with their money but to subscribe.

The metrics have changed over the past few years. The market is so saturated that most analysts suggest that the number of potential subscribers has hit a ceiling. It has become clear that the average household will only support a handful (roughly four) streaming services. There are also larger factors at play, as customers have started to cut their discretionary income. The streaming wars are over, everybody but Netflix lost.

Netflix itself has embraced that pivot. As of the first quarter of this year, Netflix will no longer report on its number of subscribers. Instead, the company has recently started publishing data that measures audience engagement with its product in terms of minutes watched, which marks a clear departure from the service’s long history of obfuscating those figures. For most streaming services, the priority has shifted from adding subscribers to reducing churn.

Unable to reliably grow subscribers, streaming services have prioritized ways of generating more money from their existing base. After years assuring its shareholders that advertising was not part of its “brand proposition” and that it did not want to be “tied up with all that controversy around advertising”, Netflix added an advertisement-supported tier. This allows the company to earn more from each subscriber than what they might pay in subscription.

This pivot in priority is reflected in the programming of these streaming services. These companies are less interested than they were in producing high-profile prestige offerings to entice new customers, and more likely to invest in long-term investments that ensure both a guaranteed immediate audience and an extended commitment from existing subscribers. Live broadcasting, the return of “appointment viewing” is a great way to accomplish this goal.

In recent years, streaming services have invested heavily in live broadcasts. In 2022, Disney+ streamed Elton John’s farewell concert. Netflix has embraced live comedy, with roasts of figures like Tom Brady. For the past two years, Netflix has livestreamed the Screen Actors Guild Awards, including a very glitzy show this year hosted by Kristen Bell. Netflix’ embrace of the Screen Actors Guild has been perceived as an audition to broadcast the Oscars, which are looking for a new home.

However, this embrace of live broadcasting by the streaming services is particularly evident in sports. The past few years have seen a sizable investment from these companies in sports and sports-adjacent entertainment. Apple TV+ signed a deal with Major League Baseball that is reportedly worth “$85m per year” to the sports body. Amazon’s recent deal with the NBA is apparently worth $1.8b annually over the next eleven years.

Peacock has invested heavily in a diverse range of shows including Ted, Poker Face and Twisted Metal, but Universal’s streaming service had its best month ever in August 2024 when it live broadcast the Olympics. Peacock provided subscribers with “more than 4,000 hours of live coverage during the Olympics, with users streaming 23.5 billion minutes of Paris 2024 coverage.” These sorts of events can draw consistent crowds over an extended period.

The goal is to cultivate an audience that uses the service regularly and reliably, and treats it as an essential service. A customer who will watch fifty weekly episodes of Raw over twelve months is far more valuable to Netflix than an audience member who signs up for a month to binge Stranger Things right before cancelling their subscription. While viewers might bank episodes of The Boys on Prime Video to binge-watch them over a weekend, there is an incentive to tune in live to the NBA.

Netflix understands this. Its broadcast of two NFL games on Christmas Day 2024 reportedly averaged over 30m viewers each. Of course, there are some logistical challenges in streaming events like these globally. The Screen Actors Guild Awards were beset with sound issues. The boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson in November 2024 suffered from buffering and streaming issues. However, these are technical and engineering problems. They can be solved.

The emphasis on live sports broadcasting is also perhaps understood in a broader attempt to bring back appointment viewing to streaming. Services like Max, Disney+ and Amazon have moved away from the traditional “binge” release model for their shows, dropping them over multiple weeks. It’s quite common for these services to drop new episodes of shows like The Pitt in prime time in key markets, which allows these shows to organically grow their audiences over their run.

After all, there is a growing sense that the traditional streaming model did not work entirely as desired. This revolutionary approach was pioneered by tech companies like Netflix, which operated under the ethos of “move fast and break things.” Huge sums of money were blown on projects that evaporated from public consciousness on impact; shows that had to be made twice or that were never made at all. Perhaps some things did not need to be broken.

The messaging from these services has largely signaled a shift away from more artisanal projects. Scott Stuber, the longstanding head of Netflix’s film division who worked with directors like Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, stepped down in January 2024. Jen Salke, who had been in charge of film and television production at Amazon stepped down in March 2025. The priorities of these companies have changed dramatically over the past few years.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was reportedly annoyed by what he perceived as extravagant spending on shows like Rings of Power and Citadel, and is pushing Prime Video to become profitable. This strategy will involve shifting a significant portion of company’s spending away from film and television into sports. Amazon’s total content spend last year was reportedly $7b, but the company is aiming to allocate $3b of that total towards sports rights on a yearly basis.

Streaming services reportedly spent $10b on live sports rights last year, up from less than $3b five years ago. This spending has yet to hit a ceiling, with analysts suggesting that streamers will increase their spending to $12.5b this year. This is a paradigm shift in how these companies treat media, and the broadcast of WrestleMania on Netflix feels like a significant moment in this larger commercial realignment.

For years, it was argued that streaming would kill linear television. Linear television is certainly in decline. However, there is something undeniably Freudian at play. While streaming positioned itself as an entirely new medium with new rules and conventions, the reality is far more complicated. Streaming has embraced old modes of broadcast: advertising, appointment viewing, weekly releases, the importance of live sports. Streaming might have tried to kill television, but it is also becoming it.