Billy Corgan Teases TV & Streaming Partners For The NWA
In a recent appearance on the “Good Karma Wrestling” podcast, Billy Corgan teased an upcoming TV and streaming deal for the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).
According to Corgan, the NWA has been in talks with several outlets for years.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On negotiating with major streaming platforms: “I’ve talked to just about everybody in the sphere over the last few years. For a while, I was in discussions with WWE, when they were more interested in bringing outside content onto the network. That didn’t happen. They were very cool about it, though, so nothing but love there. I’ve talked to every major platform in the world. I don’t have to roll the names out because I wasn’t able to necessarily get those deals done.”
On finding a broadcast partner: “I think everything from here is, we have to find network broadcast partners. We have some good news coming up, I think, that will surprise and get some people talking as far as where we’re going. But at the end of the day, Dave Meltzer is not my friend, and of course, if you’re a wrestling fan, you know who Dave Meltzer is. But I do agree with Dave Meltzer on one thing, which is if you don’t have TV at the higher level, you’re gonna have a hard time drawing. I think at the end of the day, wrestling always works in conjunction with television. We have a very robust YouTube channel, where we put all our programming, and we still partner with FITE on our pay-per-views, and our numbers are pretty good on YouTube, so there’s nothing to sneeze at there. But until you can reach that larger public [through] broadcast, whether it’s digital or classic old-school networks, you’re gonna have a hard time really growing. So that’s kind of where we’re at right now. We’re right on the precipice of that.”
On how to take NWA to a higher level: “It’s a difficult thing to easily answer because there are a lot of strong, independent wrestling organizations in the world. I would say anything below New Japan, AAA, AEW, or WWE, you could classify as a top-tier independent or a second-tier independent, and I don’t mean that as a slight. We’re just talking about economics. I want the National Wrestling Alliance to be up there and competing at the top level with WWE, New Japan, AAA, and AEW. So we’re doing is to get ourselves prepared for a bigger run at a higher level, which seems counterintuitive to a lot of the crowd that follows the independent scene. But that’s exactly what we’re here to do. What we can do and how we can do it at a ground level, there’s lots of argument there to be made. Part of it is economic, part of it is trying to build the product up from the ground up. Part of it is even delineating that our wrestling product is far different than just about every other company out there.”
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