With WWE Debut, Netflix Pummels Traditional Live TV Into Submission

The recent premiere of “WWE: Monday Night Raw” on Netflix was yet another major step in the SVOD giant’s gradual foray into the live TV world. Viewership for “Raw” may not have been as large as some of Netflix’s other recent live broadcasts, but it’s even more confirmation that sports content may be the way to KO broadcast and cable.

Per a Netflix press release, the live “Raw” broadcast brought in 4.9 million views globally and reached an average of 2.6 million households in the U.S. alone, more than double the average 1.2 million U.S. household audience “Raw” saw in 2024, according to VideoAmp. The event itself, a celeb-studded affair at the packed Los Angeles Intuit Dome, is now WWE’s highest-grossing non-premium live event to date.

In the grand scheme of Netflix’s tiptoe into live TV — the $5 billion deal with WWE being its most monumental — the “Raw” premiere’s viewership is in a similar range as Netflix’s first live experiments from last year, “The Roast of Tom Brady” (2 million) and “Kat Williams: Woke Foke” (4 million), as part of the Netflix Is a Joke Fest.

The biggest live draw by a sizable margin remains the much-hyped Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match last November, which drew in well over 100 million global live AMA (average minute audience) viewers despite the widespread technical issues, while the NFL’s Christmas games brought in a collective 62.3 million AMA views.

It’s worth noting that the AMA viewership metric for NFL games and the Tyson-Paul fight gives a closer estimate to how many unique viewers tuned in, while the “Raw” premiere and comedy specials’ viewership was found by dividing total hours watched by runtime, so it isn’t a straight apples-to-apples comparison. Still, it’s safe to infer that the audience for “Raw” was smaller than those seen for Netflix’s other sporting events thus far.

That being said, the Netflix-era WWE is far from a bust. It’s important to note that “worldwide” viewership for the “Raw” premiere only means the territories where Netflix currently distributes the show, which includes the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and parts of Latin America. The other 92 countries and territories that have access to Netflix are still on the table, and it’s not a stretch to assume the Big Red N has big plans for making WWE a global brand under its wing.

Also, as part of the broadcast deal, Netflix has exclusive rights to WWE’s paid specials and other weekly shows — “SmackDown” and “NXT” — outside of the U.S. As the company continues to expand WWE’s brand, the solid “Raw” viewership right out the gate suggests audiences are more than willing to watch wrestling on streaming instead of cable.

Netflix didn’t need “Raw” to see that traditional TV audiences are shrinking, of course. A recent exploration of Nielsen TV ratings from 2014 to 2024 demonstrated that viewer numbers have dwindled over a decade of cord-cutting, while the number of streaming platforms have grown. But all the while, sports were a saving grace for broadcast and cable TV, as people were still willing to pay to watch their favorite teams.

While sports were always the biggest draws on TV, the top 100 most watched telecasts in recent years are overwhelmingly sports-centric. Only 37 of the 100 top telecasts in 2019 were for sports; in 2024, they made up nearly three quarters of the list.

Streamers locking in long-term broadcast rights with major sports leagues lately was a significant blow to the notion that sports were the last pillar of “old” TV. Broadcast and cable’s worst fears were realized early into the “sports on streaming” era, when Amazon Prime Video became the first streamer to make Nielsen’s ratings list in 2022 thanks to its “Thursday Night Football” airings.

Jump to today, and the fact that one of the longest-running cable programs in history reeled in solid viewership in its streaming debut exposes an inconvenient truth for traditional TV: Audiences aren’t exactly precious about watching sports the old-fashioned way.

If anything, WWE might be on the cusp of a new era owing to streaming, which has courted younger audiences who can’t or won’t pay for cable. The sports world’s top brass seems aware of the shifting tides, as 65% of executives surveyed by Altman Solon in November said they were concerned that sports are losing relevance with younger generations but that “there is still time to address the issue.”

The natural solution to said issue, then, might be streaming. After all, there’s ample evidence that younger audiences have cut cable or never signed up to begin with in favor of paying for streaming subscriptions. But even if (or when) streaming fully takes over sports broadcasting, there remains the looming threat of social video and short-form content, which is already showing signs of absorbing Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s attention over SVOD.

In other words, in the continued fracturing of the entertainment world among the old industry, the streaming giants and the bustling creator economy, even sports may lose their luster with viewers.