WWE RAW was originally not set for a move to Netflix

It has been a month now since WWE RAW made the move to the streaming giant Netflix. Premiering on January 6, 2025, many believe the transition from broadcast television to an streaming platform has gone smoothly. However, it has been recently revealed that the red brand was not originally set for the move.

Making an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, TKO Group CEO, Ari Emanuel spilled the beans on the deal with Netflix. He was asked by host Pat McAfee about how he got the deal through the door, and why Netflix was chosen over others.

Emanuel recalled how he sat down for breakfast with Bella, later revealed to run all of the content programming, and works directly under Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos. He revealed that a presentation was done, with NXT being in mind for the move.

However, over the course of the presentation, talks began to move away from the black and silver brand and towards WWE RAW.

"We did a presentation to her, and then all of a sudden, it was, first started talking about NXT actually, and then it just immediately moved to RAW," sad Ari Emanuel.

It's hard to imagine now what it would have been like if NXT was on Netflix instead of WWE RAW.

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WWE RAW's premiere on Netflix registered some incredible numbers

It's safe to say that WWE RAW's premiere on Netflix was a huge success. The January 6 debut episode outperformed the previous week's episode on the USA Network by a huge margin.

According to the numbers that were officially released by both WWE and Netflix, the episode scored a whopping 4.9 million global views. Additionally, it also averaged 2.6 million household views, which was a huge improvement on the 1.596 million they did on the USA Network.

The red brand broke several records on the night. After all, it was not only the first time since 2018 that RAW had surpassed the four million viewer mark, but it was also the highest-watched RAW since 2015.

It has clearly been a great move, both for WWE and Netflix. It will be interesting to see what other records can be broken with this partnership.