Eric Bischoff recently spoke to Wrestlezone’s Kevin Kellam ahead of his live appearance at C2E2 After Dark in Chicago tonight. Bischoff will be joining Tony Schiavone and Conrad Thompson on stage for ‘C2E2 After Dark Presents: What Happened in 83 Weeks’.
Bischoff spoke about how the wrestling landscape has changed in recent months, saying he can see the similarities in All Elite Wrestling and when he took over WCW before the Monday Night Wars started up. He said there are more opportunities for AEW to succeed than there might have been a few years ago, but their success doesn’t necessarily depend on a television contract:
“It really is. As all of the stuff was happening, WWE signing their deal with FOX and USA, that was a major, billion dollar licensing deal, crazy stuff. When I read about AEW and the Khan family investing $100 million over the course of three years to build this company, I went ‘wow, that does sound familiar.’
It’s so exciting, it’s fun to watch. It’s very satisfying to me to see a genre, an industry, a business like professional wrestling—which is kind of a weird, little world unto itself—to see it grow and be successful and continue for generations of fans, it’s so exciting. For a company like AEW to come along and take advantage of all of the opportunities that technology provides today—streaming—even five years ago, if somebody came to me and said ‘I’ve got $100 million and I want to get into the wrestling business. How do I do it?’ The first thing you would have to do is find a home on an established, competitive cable outlet. Today that is not the case. Today with the access to and the affordability of great quality streaming, you don’t need a television platform. There are other ways to get your product out there into the global marketplace that don’t require television. In fact, I would probably say to somebody that is investing in any form of entertainment today to pursue anything other than traditional television. Television, in my opinion, five years from now, we won’t recognize it. It’ll be like the ‘Blockbuster’ video stores of entertainment. It’ll still be here, but you won’t recognize it.”
When asked what he would do if you was All Elite Wrestling right now, Bischoff said he would move focus towards creating a new streaming platform for the company, and not focus on TV. Bischoff cited cable’s decline and streaming’s rise, saying cable networks could ruin a promotion’s chances by dropping them at any time, but an OTT service will provide more stability:
“I would seriously think about building my own streaming platform. I’d go the OTT route, similar to what WWE has done with the WWE Network. I would program my own over-the-top network and not be dependent on a cable outlet, because those relationships come and go, they evolve, they have a shelf life. You might build your entire company and brand and do a great job of it, but at some point you’ve got a network executive saying ‘yeah… we don’t really want to do this anymore. We want to do that instead.’ It has nothing to do with the success or the failure of the product that you put on the network, but if a network decides that they are going to change their brand—they want to become a comedy network instead of a male sports network—you’re out of business. And rather than be dependent on that relationship with a television network or outlet, I would want to be in control of my own destiny and I would build my own streaming platform.”
