With WWE giving away its 12 major shows of the year to subscribers to its new online network, the end appears nigh for pro wrestling pay-per-views. John Lister explores the history of a technology that revolutionized the wrestling business.
While the network launch presentation heavily implied Vince McMahon had created pay-per-view, the first media reports of the concept appeared when he was just two years old. The October 1947 edition of Popular Mechanics discussed the idea of a “pay-as-you-see hook-up” from manufacturers Zenith Radio Corporation. It would use a “Phonevision” technology by which a blurred picture was broadcast over the airwaves, which could only be tweaked into a watchable image through additional frequency information that was transmitted via the viewer’s telephone line.
Tests in 1951 allowed viewers to watch premium movies for a dollar a time (around £6 at today’s prices.) Although regulatory issues stopped it being rolled out nationwide, the technology appeared to be a hit: those in the test area watched four times as many movies through Phonevision as they did in cinemas.
Pay-per-view became even more literal in the early 60s with “Telemeter” in the outskirts of Toronto. Rather than use their phoneline, customers had a special plug-in box into which they would insert coins to pay for a particular program. It wasn’t restricted to movies but instead included live events such as boxing and football matches, plus a special performance by Bob Newhart. (It doesn’t appear any wrestling shows were included in the line-up.) Toronto Star critic Nathan Cohen made the somewhat accurate forecast that the pay-per-view model would work “For hockey games, yes, for boxing matches, maybe, and for anything else—most likely, no.”
Boxing was indeed the first real hit when nationwide pay-per-view became viable with the expansion of cable television. Until the 1970s, major boxing bouts were almost exclusively shown on free television in the United States, which is part of the reason the likes of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman remain such cultural icons. While a few homes were offered the Ali-Foreman “Thriller In Manila” bout on PPV, the first major boxing bout on the pay format was Roberto Duran vs Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980, with a reported 155,000 customers. The following year Leonard’s clash with Thomas Hearns was reputedly purchased by 48.6 percent of the 1.2 million Verizon customers with pay-per-view capabilities
The early moves by pro wrestling promoters into making cash from a national viewing audience came instead from closed circuit, in which viewers paid to see the broadcast at a cinema or on a large screen at a local arena. The first closed circuit broadcast actually took place in the United Kingdom in 1966 with a Royal Albert Hall show beamed to 11 cinemas.
Although the Southern California promotion had shown some bouts live in local cinemas, the first national closed circuit wrestling event was the 1976 Muhammad Ali-Antonio Inoki bout. Most territories showed it in their main arena alongside a live undercard with local stars, while around 150 cinemas simply showed the Japanese broadcast of Ali-Inoki and Andre the Giant against boxer Chuck Wepner. These broadcasts, promoted by Vince McMahon Jr, were something of a financial bust.
The pay-to-view model thus remained off the table until 1983 when Jim Crockett Promotions, fresh off a show that saw several thousand fans turned away for the Greensboro Coliseum and caused a major traffic jam, decided to air the first Starrcade in many of its regular venues around the Mid-Atlantic territory. 30,000 fans paid to see the show on the big screens (along with 15,000 watching the show in person), kicking off an annual tradition.
McMahon took the Starrcade closed circuit model nationwide in 1985 with the first WrestleMania, promoted through a major mainstream media blitz thanks to the involvement of celebrities Mr T and Cindi Lauper. Although it appears to be something of an exaggeration that the event was literally make or break, weak advance sales certainly caused some sleepless nights. In the event, the show was a hit with around 400,000 paying customers, 9 times as many people as had ever paid to see a single wrestling show before.
While the first WrestleMania was available on pay-per-view television in a handful of local markets, the first wrestling show aimed exclusively at the technology came later that year when WWF ran The Wrestling Classic, featuring Hulk Hogan vs Roddy Piper and a 16-man tournament. Billed under the “Wrestlevision” banner, the event attracted something in the region of 50,000 viewers.
WrestleMania 2 was also available on pay-per-view as well as closed circuit, though the home TV audience was still in the dinstinct minority at this point. The real breakthrough came with WrestleMania III, by which time somewhere close to 10 million homes now had pay-per-view capabilities. Appropriately enough given its title, the show was a triple triumph from a business perspective: the crowd in the Pontiac Silverdome led to the first million-dollar live gate, the closed circuit showing drew 450,000 viewers, and the pay-per-view was bought in around 400,000 homes.
In the space of just four years, the business had moved from Starrcade being the first show to gross more than a million dollars (including closed circuit tickets) to Hogan and Andre drawing a total of $17.3 million. To anyone paying attention, it was clear that pay-per-view was the future of the business and would one day surpass live shows as the main source of income.
Indeed, that shift led to an immediate change in the way WWF scheduled shows. While some other territories had built up to big holiday shows, WWF business had largely been based around running regular monthly dates in its main venues, fluctuating depending on the main event matches but generally keeping steady throughout the year. In building up the early WrestleManias, McMahon became so concerned about fans getting their wrestling fix and having less interest in an “ordinary” live event that he introduced a gap of several weeks after the big show during which WWF didn’t even attempt promoting events in the US. Instead the promotion used this period to experiment with foreign tours to Australia and Europe, and it’s the legacy of this scheduling that is part of the reason WWE still consistently visits the UK in April to this day.
Crockett, by now the only former regional promoter with a realistic hope of nationwide success saw WrestleMania’s success on pay-per-view and believed he had found the answer. While McMahon had done a better job of attracting mainstream attention and using his TV exposure to create superstars who could draw live crowds, Crockett’s crew believed that superior in-ring action could help it prevail when trying to persuade people to pay to watch the product on television. He scheduled the 1987 Starrcade for pay-per-view and began planning how to spend an expected $10 million windfall.
McMahon quickly booked the first Survivor Series event on pay-per-view for the same night. Crockett rescheduled Starrcade for the afternoon and cable company providers reacted happily, planning to offer both shows as a combined package. However, McMahon then decreed that carriers would only be allowed to carry WWF pay-per-views if they showed no rival events in the 60 days before or 21 days after. Faced with the threat of being locked out of the following year’s WrestleMania, around 400 local carriers opted not to carry Starrcade, leaving it available in just half a dozen local markets and bombing financially.
It sparked off a tit-for-tat battle. Crockett’s second PPV show came in January 1988 with the Bunkhouse Stampede. This time McMahon countered by running the first televised Royal Rumble as a free event on the USA Network. In return Crockett aired the first Clash of the Champions opposite WrestleMania IV. Although Mania did well on pay-per-view, the move certainly hurt the potential revenue and even led to a New York cable operator chief somewhat prematurely telling Multichannel News that “the product has reached the end of its competitive life cycle.”
Crockett may have inflicted damage in that battle, but he lost the war. He’d been counting on the pay-per-view takings to fund the guaranteed contracts he’d offered several top stars to deter them from jumping ship. This financial shortfall was only worsened when falling TV ratings meant his share of ad revenue was lower then expected and by the end of 1988 he was forced to sell out to Ted Turner.
1988 also saw what remained of the regional territories try and fail to use PPV as a saviour. The AWA teamed up with Jerry Jarrett (who now ran both the Memphis territory and the remains of World Class in Dallas) and womens promoter David McLane to present SuperClash III. It drew well below the 60,000 or so buys needed to make a profit and the most exciting clash actually came after the event as the promoters rowed about the distribution of what revenue did come in.
During this era McMahon had three unsuccessful experiments with running non-wrestling events on pay-per-view. In 1988 he paid a whopping $9.5 million for the rights to promote Sugar Ray Leonard’s return against the little-known Donny Lalonde. Despite promoting heavily to wrestling fans (including numerous extended hype segments during SummerSlam), McMahon is thought to have lost the best part of $5 million after attracting fewer viewers than for any of his wrestling events at that point.
Three years later McMahon put the first championship event for his breakaway World Bodybuilding Federation group on pay-per-view, following up with a second event in 1992. Again McMahon used his wrestling programming to push the shows, even launching a separate show called WBF BodyStars on the USA network, co-hosted by Lex Luger. Whatever crossover audience existed wasn’t interested in paying to see the event and both shows drew just a few thousand buys.
Throughout the first half of the 1990s, pay-per-view settled into a series of familiar trends. Despite occasional one-off successes such as a New Kids on the Block concert and a New Year’s Eve special from shock jock Howard Stern, the only events to consistently do business were combat based: boxing, wrestling and (despite having no exposure on regular television) the UFC.
The proportion of potential buyers wrestling splashing out for individual showed consistently declined, while the actual number of people buying WrestleMania dropping every year but one between 1988 and 1997. However, total revenues rose thanks to a combination of more homes getting pay-per-view capability, the price of the shows gradually rising, and both WWF and WCW increasing the number of events they put on each year to five and seven respectively.
The next big change in the landscape came in 1995 when WWF experimented with putting a show on every month. Believing fans would not be prepared to spend the now-standard $30 every time, it instead launched a series of minor pay-per-views under the “In Your House” banner. The shows were priced at $14.95 and ran for two rather than three hours, usually featuring only part of the roster.
Although overall PPV revenue was boosted by the new shows, falling buyrates meant WWE was barely better off after accounting for the additional costs. Still, the experiment proved a monthly show could attract an audience and, as the Raw vs Nitro battle sparked a revival in wrestling’s overall business, WCW switched to a 12-show schedule in 1997, with every show a full-price three hour event.
In September of 1997, behind in the ratings and still slowly recovering from the mid-90s business slump, WWE rolled the dice by ditching the bargain show concept. While switching to a permanent $30/three hour format appeared on paper to be worse value for fans, takings increased substantially, helping put WWE back into profit. Ironically the figures showing the gamble had worked didn’t become available for several weeks, by which time a cash-strapped Vince McMahon had already decided to void Bret Hart’s contract, leading to the infamous Montreal Screwjob.
From that point, monthly shows became the norm. WWE briefly considered running cut-price weekly late-night shows in 1997 but cancelled the plan (using the booked dates instead for the Shotgun Saturday Night television show.) TNA originally launched with weekly pay-per-views in what was designed as a modern take on the old territorial schedule, but unprofitable buyrates eventually led to it switching to a monthly model and eventually cutting down to just four events a year.
While WrestleMania remains strong, other WWE pay-per-views have been gradually declining over the years to the point that weaker shows regularly attract fewer than 100,000 buys in North America, a figure the company would once have considered disastrous. The pay-per-view concept is certainly far from dead, with both UFC and boxing recording their second biggest-selling events ever in 2013, but WWE appears to lack either the will or the ability to consistently put together line-ups that can attract people willing to pay as much as $55.
That in itself is not the disaster it might once have been. The Attitude Era boom and the increasing importance of live and/or “sports-like” programming to TV networks terrified of viewers skipping commercials on digital video recorders have meant that WWE continue to earn more money from its free TV shows. Over the past few years TV rights fees have overtaken pay-per-view as WWE’s biggest source of income, a trend the company expects to be solidified if it achieves a significant rights fee hike when contracts for Raw and Smackdown expire later this year.
But making the monthly events available for “free” on the WWE network is still a major gamble. It may take time for less tech-savvy viewers to switch to the online network, but WWE has effectively pressed the killswitch on pay-per-view: even if the network shuts up shop after a couple of years, it’s hard to imagine viewers who’ve become used to paying $9.99 a month being prepared to pay large sums again for anything but the most special events.
Even with declining interest, pay-per-view still generated $83.6 million dollars for WWE in 2012, money WWE is effectively staking on a wager that the network will be a hit. While the future of the company is not on the line, it’s certainly the biggest gamble Vince McMahon has made since he first tried to change the rules of the game with WrestleMania.
Under The Radar
While the likes of WrestleMania and Starrcade have earned their slots in the history books, there have been plenty of more obscure shows that have attempted to cash in on the possibilities that pay-per-view brings. Here are five of the more offbeat offerings:
No Holds Barred: The Match, The Movie (27 December 1989): In an attempt to recoup some of the expenses from its first venture into movie making, the WWF put on a cut-price pay-per-view event which aired the film followed by a taped cage bout featuring Hulk Hogan & Brutus Beefcake vs Randy Savage and Zeus. It was the culmination of a Hogan-Zeus feud built around the idea that the movie character rivalry had spilled over into “reality”.
LPWA Super Ladies Showdown (23 February 1992): The all female promotion put on a 12-match show highlighted by a tournament featuring several Japanese stars. The live event drew just 400 fans and it didn’t appear the pay-per-view did much better.
AAA When Worlds Collide: With Mexico’s AAA often outdrawing the major US promotions in locations such as California and Illinois in the early 90s, WCW decided to co-promote a pay-per-view event. Despite WCW staff seemingly sabotaging the event by barely promoting it and having the show end 40 minutes earlier then expected, it remained one of the best received shows of its era. It’s remembered for a genuine classic hair vs mask bout pitting El Hijo Del Santo and Octagon against Eddy Guerrero and Art Barr, and also marked the commentary debut of Mike Tenay.
Bodyguards and Bandits (1 May 1996): Promoted the Confederate Wrestling Alliance from the Dallas Sportatorium, this show featured just one match, a 12-man tag bout which would run for a set 60 minutes and feature American football-style scoring for different types of victory. While John Hawk (JBL) is the best-known name from the bout, the winning score went to Dom Minaldi, a local bodyguard brought into the match by the sponsors who financed the show.
Heroes of Wrestling (10 October 1999): With wrestling booming, a TV and movie production company tried to capitalize with a pay-per-view event featuring stars from the 1980s. Not only did the show flop at the box office, but it featured some of the worst bouts in TV wrestling history, including an Iron Sheik & Nikolai Voloff vs Bushwhackers bout rated by one critic as minus 273 stars — in other words, absolute zero.
