Hi Keith,
When a boxing match, an industry declared dead 20 years ago, makes more PPV money with the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight than in the history of earth, how bad is it going to look to investors that were told the PPV market was dead anyway to justify crappy Network numbers? How long until looking bad becomes looking incompetent?
Someone needed to remind Vince you can't hardsell a subscription service, and the hardsell was his family's entire business model.
Unrelated note, wasn't cowboy hat Macho King awesome? Him screwing over Warrior just to be a jerk at Rumble 91 was what hooked me on wrestling.
"Free month of May" sure feels like a hard sell to me. As others have noted, if this is the route they're going they should just do the "first month is free for new subs" model like Netflix and be done with it. Although WM did 250K buys this year, which is pretty much free money at this point. All they have to do is fire another 10% of their workforce and they'll be profitable for years!
People are talking about 4 million buys for the Pacquio/Mayweather fight, though, which sounds ludicrous. Still, even 2 million at $100 a pop is crazy money and shows that the right attraction will still draw.