There’s no doubt that Impact Wrestling switching to the Pursuit Channel is viewed as a downgrade for the company because the channel is available in far fewer homes than Pop TV.
Pursuit is a sister channel of The Fight Network and they will air Impact on Friday nights at 10 pm eastern. Despite the huge improvement in quality of the overall product in 2018, the company’s weekly ratings have drastically decreased especially during the new 10pm timeslot.
A move to Pursuit would likely mean another huge drop since that channel is not available on most big cable systems and the ones that do carry it have it on one of their upper pay tiers.
Dave Meltzer talked about the situation regarding Impact Wrestling and the wrestling journalist is reporting that officials were actually trying to sell the company to All Elite Wrestling several months ago but the proposal was turned down. There's no reason on why the offer was rejected.
Impact management hopes that the 10 pm timeslot on Friday night will help them out in the long run. They hope that when SmackDown Live moves to FOX in October, wrestling fans will change the channel at 10 pm to watch Impact.