I'm doing a little bit of work on the WWE stock, and I am trying to analyze the upcoming TV negotiations.

To recap:

Raw and Smackdown's deal with NBCU (who owns Spike and Syfy) expire in ~6 months. Right now, WWE is shopping the deal around to competitors and NBCU will have the right to match anything. Its estimated that WWE receives just over $100M a year from NBCU for the TV rights.

The speculation is that the new TV deal will be much better. Anywhere from two to four times better is what wall street is expecting. Everyone is looking at deals that NASCAR, UFC, got and thinking that WWE is massively underpriced. They compare WWE to live sporting events (low DVD usage, just like live sports).

My question is what do you all think of this? The numbers look something like this:

2.4M people attended live events in 2009, 2013 it was just under 2M.
4.5M pay per view buys in 2009, 2013 3.8M.
3.7M average weekly households tuning into Raw in 2009, 3.4M tuning in during 2013

Looking at the numbers, it looks like WWE is less popular now than it was then. In addition, who else, besides USA is going to bid for the programming? It seems counter intuitive that they would want to return to Spike TV because the reach is lower and they were so happy to leave. So that leaves the new Fox Sports network?

I'm just trying to understand why the market expects WWE to double to quadruple their TV deal when the data seems to point to a less popular product. Thanks and sorry if this is a little off topic!

From the little bit I've read on it they're hoping to get half of the $880M deal that NASCAR has. It seems like a monster deal. It's being said that if they get near that $440M that the network could go belly up and that would just be a drop in the bucket. I gotta read more into this though, it's quite interesting.

Viacom will definitely be bidding despite what you said about it (spike tv). Beyond that, I'm not sure.

It is true that the success/failure of the network is a drop in the bucket compared to the magnitude of the new TV deal.

I'm just trying to get an idea of how competitive this TV deal will be.... Seems like there is a relatively small pool of advertisers that are doing well on WWE (video games, movies, etc.). I guess they've gotten some interest from auto advertisers too in the last 5 years. But compared to NASCAR, the pool of interested advertisers seems much narrower.

Dumb question #1: are those live TV viewing numbers only or does that count DVR/Tivo/late recording users?

Good question, don't have the answer.

Interestingly enough, WWE stock up 14% today and I haven't read a reason why...

Its all people getting excited about a big TV deal.

Strassa: I have nothing to add to this discussion, other than saying that I'm interested in what you (and anyone else, for that matter) have to say about it. Just because I don't answer doesn't mean that I'm not reading what you're writing, and I assume that the same can be said for many others in the forum.

AMC (Of Breaking Bad and Talking Dead fame, among others) are apparently now interested. When the news came out it brought WWE's stock to an all-time high of 31.98, but it settled back down below 30 by the end of the day.

Just giving facts, no real opinion on the matter.

Amc supposedly wants to buy the company

I've read that somewhere.

I cant imagine Vince and co. ever give up controlling interest. Not for anything less than a very significant amount of money that AMC probably doesnt have to bid with

Would they just start a new promotion if they did?

There would almost certainly be a long no-compete clause built into any deal

Don't know what Vince would do without the wwe

Extreme Curling League, IMO.

ohhh curling owns