WWE Network at Peacock: Your Questions Answered

Peacock is sharing more details today on how it will integrate WWE’s huge selection of content later this month, when the WWE Network becomes part of the NBCUniversal streaming service.

As announced in January, the new WWE portal will launch at Peacock from March 18. The WWE Network standalone application will close in the United States a few weeks later, on April 4. This means that current subscribers will be able to use the old app for the next Fastlane pay-per-view this month, if you like. But come WrestleMania 37, which will take place on April 10 and 11, Peacock will be the only option. There is no way to transfer a WWE subscription to Peacock, but the company is offering wrestling fans an exclusive deal to help facilitate change.

It will look like Peacock, but it will look familiar to WWE fans

As for how Peacock plans to showcase WWE programming, you will notice a new “WWE” tab in the navigation section. Once selected, you will see the usual carousels for featured programs and curated events. This is the entire Peacock user interface, but the two companies are in constant communication about which content to highlight.

Image: Peacock

Peacock said it will eventually be home to almost everything available on the WWE Network today – but the transition will not be an instant one. There will be some noticeable omissions in the early days. For the March 18 launch, Peacock subscribers will have access to the following:

All PPV events in the last calendar year; episodes from the current or most recent season of the original WWE series The Broken Skull Sessions by Steve Austin, WWE Chronicle, and WWE Icons; action in the ring with new weekly episodes of NXT the day after the air, as well as the 2021 replays of CRUDE and Smash 30 days after air; innovative documentaries, including Undertaker: The Last Ride, WWE 24, and WWE Untold; reality series including Total Bellas; as well as collections of featured series, current moments like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin Week and playlists featuring current stars.

You will wait a few months for all those pay-per-views

Here is the bad news: the huge vault from WWE Network, WCW and ECW pay-per-views will not be ready for the first day. Instead, Peacock is promising to have all this content available “before SummerSlam, ”Which is in August. This means that professional wrestling fans can go several weeks without any convenient way to watch past events, as the WWE Network app will be history in the United States. (The international version will continue to operate as it does today.)

The exception to this is WrestleMania; all previous WrestleMania events will be available at launch at Peacock.

Correspondence labels no longer exist

Another potential disappointment for frequent WWE viewers is that PPVs and on-demand programs will no longer be divided with “markers” to separate them into several different segments that are easy to skip. Instead, each one will just be a long flow. (Peacock told me that he is working on visual debugging bar visualizations to help viewers find what they want as they advance through WWE videos.)

The search will not be as comprehensive as it was on the WWE Network

And finally, the search at Peacock will not be as robust as it was on the WWE Network. While the WWE Network allows you to search for a specific WWE game or superstar right in the search bar, this will not be the case at Peacock – at least initially. This is something that fans can expect to improve in the coming months. But even so, it may not quite match what was possible on the WWE Network.

Get a discount when moving from WWE to Peacock

Peacock acknowledges that there is more work to be done to satisfy the WWE Network’s diehards. So, to help sweeten the pot, he will be offering an exclusive discount to WWE fans. They can get four months of Peacock Premium for $ 9.99. That drops to $ 2.50 a month. Peacock Premium typically costs $ 4.99 a month, which in itself is less than a long-standing $ 9.99 / month subscription to the WWE Network.

There would always be compromises on this Peacock and WWE tag team, and I think I covered the main ones that fans care about here. Putting a service tailored to a very specific audience in a more conventional streaming application poses challenges. Also, remember that we are still talking about the launch experience; it is possible for Peacock to come back and add some of these features if customers are vocal enough. I also hope that other features that the WWE Network never saw (such as offline downloads) will come true at Peacock.