Tony Khan says Ring of Honor deserves better than YouTube for its weekly show.
Since Khan acquired ROH in March 2022, he has repeatedly expressed his interest in bringing the company back to weekly television. But as of this writing, ROH has only held two pay-per-views since the Khan era began, and it was yet to announce a home for a weekly program.
During the AEW Full Gear post-show media scrum Bill Pritchard of WrestleZone asked Khan about potentially doing a YouTube show for ROH. Khan responded by saying that there are other options out there, and he’s hesitant to jump into anything, given the value of the ROH property. He also noted that ROH’s pay-per-views have not impacted AEW’s pay-per-view buys.
“I’ve definitely considered a lot of options, but I think it would be hasty, when there are other options out there, to jump into something. It’s a pretty variable property. For example, the pay-per-views, for example, for an AEW pay-per-view, it’s probably 25% or so of what you might get for an AEW pay-per-view, or less than 25% of some AEW pay-per-views.
“Say a number like 35,000 buys at the price point for Ring of Honor, which is also a lower price point, then on the one hand, for AEW, that’s not bad revenue, but on the other hand, it’s not something I really see cannibalizing the AEW pay-per-view product because the AEW pay-per-views have been pretty stable while we’ve done the Ring of Honor pay-views.”
Khan continued by stating that he envisions the ROH TV show as a weekly series, and he believes it deserves a better platform than YouTube. He described how he has tried to balance featuring ROH talent on AEW programming, though some of ROH’s champions are top names in AEW.
“For the TV, I really would like to get that going, and I see it as a weekly series. But because it’s such a major leap, I’ve been holding off on, because yeah, I could easily just do a YouTube show. But I think it probably deserves something better than that. I think it would be, just doing a YouTube show as a placeholder I think would be a trade off. In some ways, it would be beneficial by not having some matches that could take away from other matches that would feature some people in AEW.
“But I also think a lot of the people from Ring of Honor that we’ve featured, like the champions happen to be some of the biggest names in AEW, like Chris Jericho, Samoa Joe, FTR. Those people have wrestled in matches, whether it was FTR around Forbidden Door with the Ring of Honor Tag Team Championships or Chris Jericho doing the Ring of Jericho, or Samoa Joe defending the TV Title, Mercedes is just getting back healthy. I think at times, those have been good to the show, but I also try to keep it balanced where it’s not the whole show.”
If you use any of these quotes, please credit WrestleZone for the transcription.
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