During a recent edition of his “83 Weeks” podcast, Eric Bischoff commented on Tony Khan purchasing Ring of Honor, who could be involved in creative, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Tony Khan purchasing Ring of Honor: “You could argue that because of the power of Peacock and that platform that any additional wrestling content might be a good strategic move for them, but it makes more sense for Tony [Khan] given his roster. I would agree with that absolutely. If it made sense to anybody, it made sense to Tony Khan.”
On whether he thinks it was a good deal for Khan: “In the end of it, all the conversation about was it a good deal or not for Tony, I think it was a good deal. If Tony’s goal, ultimately, is to build, independent of Turner, his own streaming platform? Absolutely, the acquisition of Ring of Honor makes sense. It’s not going to make financial sense in the short term, it’s just not. How many people around in the United States television viewing audience, how many of them even know what Ring of Honor is? Short-term, it is not going to be profitable. It can’t be. But three years from now, five years from now, seven, 10 years out? Because streaming platforms are popping up every day. That’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger and guess what? Content becomes more and more and more valuable over the course of time. Content that probably wasn’t worth anything five years ago conceivably is now worth quite a bit of money because the market has grown, but the ability to feed it with content has not.”
On potential creative options for ROH moving forward: “Here’s perhaps a short-term play that will matter with the Ring of Honor acquisition. If Tony is able to, and his team, is able to figure out a way to use Ring of Honor and its legacy and the fact that some of its talent that’s in AEW got their start early on in Ring of Honor, there’s a lot of connective tissue between Tony’s current roster and the legacy of Ring of Honor. What if they’re able to use that and use Ring of Honor as a backdrop to launch stories from? Because now you’ve got a lot of people, much like they did with CM Punk and Eddie Kingston, even though it only lasted for about 45 seconds, it was still pretty fucking cool. Well, now you’ve got Ring of Honor, access to the library to use to help fill in the backstory holes that you need to tell a really good story going forward in 2022. I think that’s a short term opportunity. I don’t know if it justifies whatever the cost was because we don’t know what that was but it doesn’t fucking matter. You’ve got it now, use it to the best of your abilities. Again, great stories have great backstory. Creating a new story out of thin air is challenging, it’s obviously done all the time. Now, you’ve got a real backstory that you can enhance to launch new stories from and that’s what I hope we see.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
