AEW To Pay For Its Television Deal?

The Wrap reporter Tony Maglio has told 411 Mania’s interview podcast that he has heard All Elite Wrestling’s proposed television deal with TNT will be a “time buy”, meaning AEW would pay the channel to air its show.

Although not unheard of in wrestling (Impact had a similar deal years ago and the WWF paid stations to air its programming in the 80s), this would be a very different deal to the one people were expecting and indeed to the deal WWE has with USA and FOX which has netted them over $1 billion.

Maglio told the podcast:

“My understanding based on the people I’ve spoken to is that it would be more AEW paying for its time on TNT than Turner paying AEW for its show. Another very good wrestling reporter and I had been talking about whether that would be the case or whether it would be a revenue share, and we’d both heard rumblings and talked to people. Maybe a couple of months ago it might have been a little bit of a different story.

But the truth is, when you’re talking to Turner, [they’re] a very well-established, very well-off company inside of gigantic parent company … it’s not the UFC. It’s not WWE, it’s not MLB. They have MLB, they have NBA. They know what they have to pay for. And I think currently, AEW has way more to prove than Turner has in terms of trying to get them to come to their networks. I think AEW needs this deal more than Turner does.”

This should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Wrap website wrote an article a few weeks back relating to the AEW television deal with Turner, in which is claimed that AEW would have an off-season and would not air every week of the year, a claim which was later refuted by Dave Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

And it should be noted that WrestleTalk has spoken to many reputable sources close to both AEW and the Turner deal and we have been categorically told that there is no truth whatsoever to this report and that a time buy deal is not on the table.

Thanks to WrestleZone for providing the transcription

 

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• TNT
• television
• time buy
• AEW

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