Much has been said about what will happen to RAW when it moves to Netflix next month, but WWE has doubled down on the product keeping its "TV-PG" rating when the flagship show moves from the USA Network to streaming.
"It’s a safe place for families, for kids, for everybody, to be able to view the programming," WWE CCO Paul "Triple H" Levesque said at a press event earlier today. "That will not change."
WWE President Nick Khan added to that with, "There’s some online chatter about how it’s going to be ‘R’ rated or, for us old folks, ‘X’ rated. That’s definitely not happening. It’s a family-friendly, multi-generational, advertiser-friendly programming. It’s going to stay that way."
Instead, the big change will be RAW's "global flair" according to Khan thanks to the show having its biggest global audience ever. "The countries outside of the United States are as important to us as the United States are," the executive explained. "We have certain targeted countries that are priorities for Netflix. They’re priorities for us. You’re going to see more of that."
Asked about the recent technical issues on Netflix which resulted in endless buffering for the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul boxing match, it sounds like those issues have since been figured out.
"Whenever we do any live events, obviously, we want it to go very smoothly for every single one of our members," Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria said. "That’s really important, I think, also to put it in perspective: It was 65 million concurrent streamers. The scale was very big, which is great. There was a lot of interest in it."
"When you test and push something to 65 million [streams] at the same time... you can’t learn these things until you do them," she continued. "So you take a big swing, and our teams and our engineers moved super quickly, stabilized it, and many of the members really had it back up and running pretty quickly."
"We learned from those things, and we’ve all obviously done a lot of stuff to learn and get ready for the NFL and Beyoncé. We’re totally ready and excited for the WWE."
Levesque added, "I’ll just say, if it blinks a couple of times and we do 60 million, I’m good with that."
While SmackDown has moved to the USA Network and NXT to The CW, WWE's PLEs like Survivor Series: WarGames and WrestleMania continue to stream exclusively on Peacock in the U.S. That deal ends in 2026, with the expectation being that they'll then also move to Netflix.
"Peacock is our incumbent partner on what was always going to respect our incumbents rights in the relationship we have there," Khan said. "So we’ll have those conversations with them in 2025 and we’ll see what shakes up."
Bajaria said, "So outside of the U.S. we’re going to have WrestleMania and Royal Rumble and so many more. We just can’t even imagine, fans of WWE who’ve been looking and have to find in different places, the easy access is going to be exciting."
This Netflix deal will potentially bring WWE its biggest audience ever and, depending on how things shake out when RAW premieres on the platform, we could see the company eventually go all in with the streaming giant (though we'd imagine the company will want to maintains some sort of presence on regular television).
As always, stay tuned for updates as we have them.