How Much Peacock Offered To Compete With ESPN For WWE PLE's Reportedly Revealed

Back in 202,1 shortly before that year's Fastlane event, WWE had reached a deal with NBCUniversal's streaming service Peacock to air all of WWE's Premium Live Events. This was exclusive to the United States as other countries would keep the WWE Network altogether.

The WWE Network came to an end when Netflix become the home for all WWE content outside the United States.

Things are changing once more now that WWE has struck a deal with ESPN that will see WWE air PLEs on their new streaming service for five years, starting in 2026. Reports claim that ESPN will be paying around $325 million per year for the content.

Dave Meltzer of F4W/WON reported that Peacock had the contractual right to match the deal between WWE and ESPN. Bryan Alvarez would go on to say,

"Peacock did make an offer, and I guess the offer was allegedly in the neighborhood of about $275 million a year. WWE wanted more, obviously, and they ended up getting the $325 million, which is why they went to ESPN over Peacock. Obviously, if Peacock had offered $400 million a year, they would have stayed, but they didn’t."
Bryan Alvarez

There were also claims that WWE thought about just giving WrestleMania exclusively to ESPN and sticking with Peacock for a certain amount of other PLE's every year, but they ended up going with ESPN overall.

Further Details On WWE And ESPN Deal

Current President and Chief Operating Officer of TKO Group, Mark Shapiro, was formerly a top executive of ESPN. He had some things to say about the deal,

In many ways, this is our destiny. If you want to expand the audience, our fan base, the fervor around WWE, and grow on a real significant national scale, you can’t do that as it relates to the sports world without partnering with ESPN.”
Mark Shapiro

ESPN's new service is set to debut on August 21st and will see consumers paying $29.99 a month for access to WWE's events.

People have pointed out the issues with this, as to access all of WWE's content, fans will need to have a Netflix account for Monday Night Raw, Peacock/USA Network for Friday Night SmackDown, the CW Network for NXT, and ESPN's new service for PLEs.

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