Credit: The American
Here are some more highlights from Dixie Carter’s interview with The American:
On her knowledge of wrestling prior to buying TNA: “I watched wrestling when I was younger. I lived in Dallas, Texas so the Von Erichs were a very big deal, and my brother and I used to watch Saturday morning wrestling, but before I got involved with TNA I had not watched the kind of modern day wrestling. At that time it was only WWE that was television.
On TNA’s success in the UK: “The British market has been essential to our success – absolutely essential – because I think it’s our first market where we’ve not only been competitive with our main competitor, but have actually had more success in television ratings and things like that. The UK was our first real break-through market and it has given us so much and helped build a great foundation on which we’ve been able to build worldwide.”
On iMPACT! going on the road more often: “That is the goal starting this year. We’re close to making a big announcement, another one besides the PPVs, which I think will have a great impact on the show, pun intended. Taking the show on the road is the natural next step for us. It’s expensive touring and it’s not that I haven’t wanted to be on the road but it’s a business decision just like losing the PPVs. I’m not going to put this company in any financial trouble, so everything we have done has been very conscious, people were saying we weren’t going to stay in business for ten weeks and here we are going into our 11th year and having more success than ever and that’s because we make good business decisions.”
Here are some more highlights from the interview that we posted earlier here on the website …
On Impact Going on the Road: That is the goal starting this year. We’re close to making a big announcement, another one besides the PPVs, which I think will have a great impact on the show, pun intended. Taking the show on the road is the natural next step for us. It’s expensive touring and it’s not that I haven’t wanted to be on the road but it’s a business decision just like losing the PPVs. I’m not going to put this company in any financial trouble, so everything we have done has been very conscious, people were saying we weren’t going to stay in business for ten weeks and here we are going into our 11th year and having more success than ever and that’s because we make good business decisions.
On Cutting Back on PPV: To cut down the PPVs was a difficult decision because you’re giving away millions of dollars to both your top line as well as the profit line on the balance sheet. We do have success in that. It’s always been the traditional way of doing wrestling but I feel we’re in a place right now where we have to shake things up and we need to look at things differently. It is a big financial risk on our part to do without it but I feel like it will make the PPVs we do much more special and I really feel it will make television mean more. We’ll have an opportunity to let programmes breathe, give away more PPV-quality matches on television, and then when we do have a PPV I know everyone of my guys are going to be fighting to be on that card and it will just be interesting to see how that plays out.
On TNA’s Future: Expanding outside of wrestling I think is important in order to grow the core product globally. Coming up with more licensing and sponsors, more programming – in the United States we just have one show and our competitor has ten hours of television a week so it is hard to compete. We have more television in the UK and that shows you how competitive we can be when we have more exposure, so that would be our goal in the United States. Again it’s not because I haven’t wanted to, it’s just contractually I haven’t been able to due to our contract agreement with Spike TV. But that is changing as well. I think all of these things combined will make for a very interesting 2013.
