Raw rolls on…LIVE

Hey Scott,

Does the WWE still need to keep Raw as a live show? It would save a ton of money and overall make the product look better if they had some time to edit the film a bit. Though presumably the argument against it is that they’d lose even more people than they have now. Counter to that, lots of very popular television shows are not "Live".

Is a "live" product necessary?

​No, but the whole live deal is USA’s insistence, not WWE. Vince was doing a taped product for many years, and even today RAW is the only live show they have. There’s never been any correlation between live/taped and ratings, but the feeling from the TV industry has become that live shows like sports are "DVR proof" and thus worth more to advertisers. So RAW pretty much has to stay live from USA’s point of view. Since WWE doesn’t get advertising revenue from it, they probably couldn’t care less if they went live every week. In fact, it would give them more time to edit, as you noted, if the show was taped. ​