Did AOL/Time Warner Make A Mistake

By Scott Keith on 24 May 2018

Hey Scott
The Baconman here, from Sherwood Park. Questions and looking for your thoughts, compared to mine.
The powers that be decided they didn’t want The WCW on their networks anymore. No wrestling period. They owned all the content, all the rights, the shows were still drawing strong ratings (especially compared with current ratings). They sold pretty much all of that for peanuts and then allowed talent just to stay home and get paid, when they could of gotten some value out of them/more content.
So… Looking back, was this one of the biggest mistakes in TV history? Not just wrestling history, but all of TV.
I would have to think so. A restructure of how the company kept its books/was funded, was probably the smartest move.

Although it was drawing strong ratings, ad rates were shit, so TNT could make way more off an episode of whatever rerun than wrestling offered. These days, absolutely they'd love to have Nitro's ratings ever week and would probably consider losing $60 million a year a blessing in return for being competitive with USA again. But at the time, I can see where they were coming from. Really though, cleaning house on the contracts would have allowed them to stay afloat for years, yes.