During a recent interview with Sport Techie, WWE Chief Product & Technology Officer Rajan Mehta commented on his WWE ThunderDome innovation for WWE, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On needing to meet technological demands of today’s sports landscape: “The volume of sports and entertainment has grown exponentially in terms of niche sports leagues, niche television content, and streaming,” Mehta said. “There’s many more options for people today. You have a combination of factors that drive that. The technology enablement to allow a lot of this, and then people’s general cultural desires, it’s very positive for sports and entertainment. But at the same time, you want to make sure you have innovation happening within your league/television show/entertainment property.”
Mehta on WWE always having a willingness to reimagine things and take risks, like with the WWE Network: “Broadly at WWE, we’ve always had a willingness to reimagine, disrupt, take calculated risks, and stay relevant. It’s about treating every day as if it’s your first day on the job and staying slightly ahead of the curve. We have that in our DNA. We’ve always taken those calculated risks. We were ahead of the game in terms of distribution of content. In 2014, we launched WWE Network, direct-to-consumer. A lot of properties were thinking about doing it, but we went ahead and did it, and it was a huge success for us.”
Mehta on WWE taking pride on how they’ve operated through COVID-19: “We take pride in how we’ve operated through COVID-19; we tried to innovate every portion of our organization. It’s important to create a diversion in these hard times and we took that to heart. We never stopped producing content and our weekly shows – we were really excited about that. Back in March, we moved content creation to Orlando without fans, central personnel only. Most recently with the ThunderDome at Amway, we are able to have 1,000 fans in attendance at any given time. When I look at what we did, at our technology and production capabilities, I feel like we set the bar. The ability to try and bring fans to our environment and give the energy of what WWE is, it feels great to watch. Part of what we do is create this energy at WWE that ties into our overall production value.”
