With one week until the launch of AEW’s weekly program “Dynamite”, an announcement was made regarding international accessibility for the weekly series.
Fite TV has issued a press release introducing AEW Plus, which will be available to viewers outside of the United States and Canada. The list of regions that the service will be made available includes the UK, Ireland, Australia, Japan, Italy, Spain, Chile, Brazil, and the Middle East.
The subscription-based service will allow viewers to watch AEW’s weekly program live at a cost of $4.99 per month or $2.99 per episode.
Earlier on Wednesday, ITV revealed that Dynamite would be airing on a four-day delay for those in the UK with a timeslot on ITV4 on Sunday mornings at 8:20 am and a one-hour highlight version airing on the main ITV network on Mondays at 11:45 pm. The AEW Plus option will allow viewers in the UK to watch it live but at a price.
POST Wrestling has reached out to officials at AEW regarding their Canadian broadcast plans and have not received a response yet.
Have to say as a UK fan that this is incredibly disappointing. I had assumed, given Cody’s comments that the UK deal they had was better than the WWE’s, that it would be airing on ITV4 live with a fairly early repeat at a reasonable time (such as primetime Thursday evening), and/or the option to watch it on ITV’s (free) on demand service afterwards. It may have been a bit naive of me, but to hear none of that is true leaves a bit of a bitter taste and seems a bit of an own goal in this market before it has even aired. I am also interested to see how they are going to reconcile the fact it is meant to be a TV-14 product but air on a Sunday morning without the kind of heavy-handed editing which marred WWE’s run on Channel 4.
I mean, while the time slot isn’t the best… a couple things come to mind.
The vast majority of UK-based fans who are aware of AEW will likely pay for the live / on-demand viewing experience that Fite is offering.
In terms of growing an audience… How many of us became fans because of Saturday morning wrestling on free TV channels? I can imagine that tons of younger fans are suddenly going to stumble across the likes of Kenny, the Bucks, and others, and have the potential to develop into a new generation of fans.
While nothing about this deal is ideal - it’s far from the end of the world.
Man, I remember waiting 6 days for edited versions of RAW to air locally on Saturdays at noon. And edited 1 hour versions of Nitro for the same period.
An edited localized version on in the morning is fine for a certain audience. And for that audience felt left out by that - the Fite streaming is pretty great.
Which is why weekend mornings is a great slot for repeats, which WWE has been doing for literally decades over here - the company whose TV deal is apparently shit in comparison. Not the first broadcast of a show which happened Wednesday night.
As a Canadian growing up in the 90’s, I sat through YEARS of Saturday and Sunday morning edited versions of RAW and Nitro. The show didn’t end up on TSN on Monday nights until 1998. Nitro never aired live in Canada.
Again, everybody making a big deal about this is acting like the live Streaming version isn’t being offered.
No, people making a big deal out of it realise that the streaming option is a last resort because they couldn’t put their money where their mouth is.
Also, if i had a few quid i could start a promotion tomorrow and get a streaming deal with FITE TV by sending a few emails. It’s an amateurish service and not at all impressive for AEW to have this setup. It’s the bare minimum.
Absolutely guaranteed every one of them is embarrassed and knows how much they’ve fucked up. A few of them with integrity probably don’t want fanboys not holding them accountable either.