FITE+ recently made a huge splash by announcing signing deals to stream GCW and several other wrestling promotions.
FITE co-founder Michael Weber recently spoke with Josh Nason on Punch Out about the company’s relationship with GCW and the move to streaming.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On how FITE+ moved into live streaming: “Here’s how it all started. So like a lot of things that we’ve learned here in the last two years, this is sort of born out of the pandemic. We had primarily been only PPV programming which worked very well for us, a good business model. But during the pandemic, all of a sudden we had no live events. And we had been tinkering with the idea of doing a subscription service Essentially, best analogy I can make is like, day-old bread. We all know PPV events do very well for obviously live and a few days after. But after 30 days, you hardly ever get a buy for those.
“And so we want to essentially make it on FITE+, the initial intention was making the older program available for viewing at a subscription rate. And it has had good success. Well, just in the last couple of months, we started adding live programming to FITE+ to amp it up and give it more value, and the only place you can see it is FITE+. And then we really did take it to the next level with GCW, Wrestling Revolver and Black Label Pro. But there’s plenty of other programming we’re adding too. In fact, I spent this morning looking at some programming that’s going to be added in December, some more in January, some special events in January. So we’re going to continue adding programming to what we have there.”
On their relationship with GCW: “So one of the things that’s been good for — you know, we were impressed with GCW and their fan loyalty, they always got reasonable and good numbers. You know, not WWE numbers, let’s not kid ourselves, or AEW numbers. But they got very good numbers, and very consistent numbers. And initially, we thought ‘Oh, i’s the same couple thousand people buying their shows every week.’ We found no, that’s not true. A a lot of people were only buying four or five events a year out of that 75 , because frankly you’d go broke if you bought every show they did. Even though it was relatively modestly priced at like $13.99. So we did more digging of actual buyers and found this much bigger universe of people who were willing to buy GCW, but couldn’t or didn’t want to buy every show. Now, at a low rate, they can watch all the shows. And we think that’s gonna really work out well for everybody. And then of course they have so much other programming they can look at in addition to just GCW.”
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