Tony Khan invites possibility of AEW streaming deal

All Elite Wrestling launched in October 2019 to plenty of fanfare from pro wrestling fans. The now three-year-old wrestling company continues to trudge on amid an ever-changing landscape. The company and its flagship show, AEW: Dynamite, have been a critically acclaimed success. One area that AEW has not forayed into quite yet though is streaming.

Their chief competition, WWE, got way ahead of the game back in 2014 when the wrestling giant launched the WWE Network. The OTT streaming platform debuted in February 2014 and eventually became a smashing success. So successful, in fact, that NBC Universal saw it and the mammoth tape library and folded it right into Peacock TV. For a nice sum, at that.

It would only make natural sense then for AEW to land a streaming deal of their own. It’s the one aspect the company has not pulled off yet. They obviously use YouTube to its maximum potential with exclusive shows running on Mondays with AEW: Dark Elevation and Tuesdays with AEW: Dark and do have a strong social media presence. But, with streaming still persistent, fans would only gain benefit from it occurring. Founder Tony Khan recently spoke about this possibility after Bloomberg recently published a report that they were getting into the game.

In speaking to UPROXX, Khan said:

“We’ve done 174 episodes of Dynamite, 80 episodes of AEW Rampage, our 17th pay-per-view event will be March 5 in Revolution, so we’ve done hundreds and hundreds of hours of AEW content in our library,” Khan says. “I also purchased Ring of Honor last year, which is a great promotion with over 20 years of history, thousands of hours of video in their library. So overall, AEW has access to so many great wrestling events, including some events that are widely considered to be some of the best wrestling events of all time. There’s a lot of interest in this library as well as the new weekly content we continue to produce each week, and I do think there’s a lot of demand for the library and it makes a lot of sense for us to try to make that AEW library available to fans all over the world on demand.”

So Khan doesn’t necessarily outright say it will happen, but he sure invites the possibility. Boasting about the tape libraries they’ve built themselves along with the Ring of Honor library, it only makes sense for it to eventually happen. The only question will simply be: when and where?

[UPROXX]