Saturday, November 11, 2017

FORMER WWE STAR TO DEBUT FOR ROH THIS WEEKEND, UPDATE ON ROH'S PLANNED STREAMING SERVICE, WHAT IT MEANS FOR PPVS AND MORE

Former WWE star Simon (Gotch) Grimm announced he would be "debuting" for Ring of Honor at their Florida events this weekend.  Grimm was at a ROH event in New York City this past May, almost immediately after his WWE release.  We are putting "debuting" in quotes as while this will be Grimm's official debut since becoming known internationally through his WWE exploits, he did have a tryout match for the company in 2005 in NYC, wrestling Oliver John.


ROH's Grand Poobah Joe Koff was interviewed by CBS Sports' Chuck Carroll, discussing a number of topics, including the planned launch of a Ring of Honor streaming service next year.  Koff has mentioned numerous times on PWInsiderElite.com appearances that the project was in the works and provided some additional details to Carroll, noting,

"Yeah, we have an app coming out in the first quarter. It really became developmentally the right time to do it. We saw an opportunity. We had a long discussion about it. We looked at the business model and how it impacts our business. We just felt that this was the time to create our own Ring of Honor stream.  You’re going to see an enhanced Honor Club. We tested it during the Global Wars Tour of streaming house shows to ringside members. You’re going to see a lot more content available, not only to everybody, but certainly in that Honor Club. [When we tested] streaming for two shows, our response was terrific from a quality standpoint and from an accessibility standpoint."

One of the ideas that has been bandied about internally within ROH is to take a page from New Japan World and live stream as many ROH events as possible for subscribers.

Koff noted during the interview that no decision has been made about the future of ROH PPVs, noting that its possible they could potentially live stream those on the App and still make them available via traditional PPV platforms, which is what WWE does.  Koff commented, "I’m not ruling out traditional pay-per-views, but the world is going that way."

Koff was asked about his "TV debut" on ROH, in a segment that got great reviews featuring Bully Ray and others, commenting on the fact there weren't a lot of spoilers making the rounds about the segment, noting, "There’s nothing on that. The only spoiler I read — and the reason why you didn’t read a lot on it — is because it was the night that WWE had all of the infection stories going on and how it changed whatever that pay-per-view they did that weekend. So it [WWE] really grabbed all the headlines.  But I saw a report in the PW Insider the next day, and they talked about that situation. And the only thing they said was that Joe Koff put Bubba over. So I probably did what I was supposed to do."

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