I really like Ring of Honor Wrestling.
The talking is minimal, the talent is phenomenal, the matches are incredible, and the production value is out of this world considering they're essentially just the Kings of the Underground.
I'll go so far as to say that if Mickie James and Big Show (the only two people in WWE I will just completely mark out for) were to for some inexplicable reason move to ROH today, I would abandon WWE until they got their act together.
I know, that's a sad statement about the value of the products of WWE and TNA as a whole. I guess it's also a pretty powerful statement about how bad I mark out for Mickie and Show, but that's a whole different topic.
The point is, the ROH product itself stellar and exudes awesomeness at near toxic levels—awesomeness that looks really good on the channel known as HD Net.
I also love HD Net—the concept, the channel itself, the awesome picture; it's all pretty sweet.
Of course, as someone who has at least a rudimentary awareness of his world, I wouldn't expect any of you to know a damn thing about HD Net—or by proxy, ROH.
You see, HD Net is kind of available to me, and possibly anyone who lives on the moon. However, those are just about the only two places they've managed to gain broadcasting rights.
I hesitate to even say it's available to me. The primary cable provider for my particular neck of the woods, Comcast, doesn't offer it and the provider that does—MediaNet—hardly exists, and won't even agree to sell it to you unless you buy a complete HD package, which they won't sell to you until you're locked in for about $70 worth of programming...
Yuck.
I've never owned a business, and statistics dictate that most of the people who read what I write probably haven't either, but keeping HD Net's highly limited national audience in mind: Would you sign your relatively unknown company to that network for a TV deal—or would it seem to make more sense to take less money up front, but be on a far more accessible network?
One of the real handicaps against ROH is that outside of people who are really into their wrestling, nobody knows it exists, or they've merely heard its name dropped here and there. This is, of course, in spite of the fact that they have a television deal...but it's with HD Net.
A television deal is usually something that helps really propel what you have to the next level—unless of course you're TNA, in which case you can't help but screw up a good thing.
The point is that with a television deal, a given promotion should see some sort of rise in popularity and the wrestling public should at least be cognizant of its existence.
That has happened, but it's happened on a microscopic level. While all publicity is good publicity (a statement all Chrysler employees who are privy to the company's recent bottom line upturn will help me defend), with the current dissension of wrestling fans and the opportunity to win people over, they could be doing so much more.
So, is there more than one underlying problem to ROH's recent plateau in ratings and expansion?
The promos are less frequent and cruder, but that should be a non-factor: One of the big criticisms against WWE and TNA is that there is too much talking and besides, most of the people you'd get to immediately switch over aren't exactly watching for the promo quality.
It probably isn't about talent quality—no offense to the contingent of Orton marks out there, but Nigel McGuinness is twice as talented and twice as interesting as the human oil slick known as “Legend Killer” and El Generico is the not-so-boring-either other half of one of ROH's most prominent tag teams—yes, ROH has tag champions and they sometimes...compete.
No, the issue can—and should—be traced back to their television deal with HD Net. The underwhelming response is appropriate since HD Net has an underwhelming number of households in which they broadcast.
I might have this whole “money making” thing totally backwards, but it seems a greater, long term success would be more attractive than a short term success which may initially pay bigger, but whose long term dividends will steadily—and often rapidly—decrease. That second is a trend ROH is seeing right before its very eyes, I'm sure much to its chagrin.
ROH obviously doesn't, or at least initially didn't, think that way, and they're paying the price for it now.
One of the problems with this argument against HD Net is that it can be countered by saying that ROH essentially had nowhere else to go—and to an extent, I have to give some credit to that counter.
Vinny Mac has broadcasting rights under NBC Universal, thus eliminating those channels, and Viacom picking up a competing promotion to TNA just wouldn't be economically viable unless both promotions began to draw huge ratings.
We have to remember to look on cable, as network TV is pretty much out at this point. FOX would normally have been a dark horse in this whole thing, but look at their current lineup: The days of “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?”, “Celebrity Boxing”, and “Steel-Cage Bear Baiting” are long gone, thus making the somewhat sensationalism driven wrestling a long-shot at best for network TV.
That, however, doesn't mean you should totally eliminate FOX subsidiaries, as their cable packages would be more than lucrative for both sides. Unlike most corporations, the FOX parent company News Corp actually has money to spend and cable subsidiary F/X has plenty of time to kill and plenty of viewers to reach.
Even an AOL-Time Warner company might be interested if given the right offer. Granted, executives there are gun-shy about wrestling after the money burning operation known as WCW murdered their books for a few years, but their cable packages are struggling to keep viewers amid a myriad of B movies and mid-90's TV reruns. A zero liability syndicate deal would have to at least get a second look from the powers that be.
Obviously, none of us was there at the negotiations, but HD Net probably won out for two reasons.
One, they probably ponied up a whole lot more up-front money than anybody else. Cary Silken isn't exactly a billionaire, and ROH does still need what equates to seed money. An offer of significantly more money would have had to at least be in the running from a strictly business perspective.
The second reason is to have the tie-in to Mark Cuban. Cuban is a nice name to be connected to and, provided he wanted to make wrestling big, he could.
The problem with those reasons is that Cuban sticking with something like wrestling is a major gamble. Cuban is still highly involved with the Dallas Mavericks and isn't going to rest until he has a baseball team, too. Those factors are going to take precedent to wrestling, making the tie-in far less lucrative.
The other problem is that HD Net does almost nothing to increase the fan base—something ROH needs to see desperately. As mentioned before, the downside to HD Net is that almost nobody on this planet gets it.
If you're not gaining fans, your revenue stream can't increase—which ultimately leads to your company going bankrupt (Hello, WCW).
Not to mention, HD Net costing an arm and a leg in other subscriptions just for the provider to sell it to you is the rule, not the exception—thus not only has ROH put themselves on a channel almost nobody gets in the first place, but they've followed the ingenious plan of locking into terms with a channel that prices itself out of a lot of demographics.
The problem is that they've handicapped themselves for what I'd assume is a multi-year block—television deals usually work that way. What's bad about that is that the longer almost nobody gets to see ROH, the less likely it is that the promotion itself will catch on.
ROH views themselves as the new alternative promotion, a sentiment confirmed by their own Bobby Cruise during an interview on Hit the Ropes Radio, makes that much worse—an alternative generally needs to be able to reach as many people as possible to gain an early foothold.
That they're locked in to this television deal with seemingly no plans to expand further is frustrating to those of us who are familiar with the product and know it can succeed, and should be frustrating to new fans who would enjoy the product itself thoroughly.
What I'm writing shouldn't be taken as a slam against ROH because the thing is, I want ROH to succeed—badly.
Nothing would make me happier to see a promotion that really is about the wrestling see some real success, not to mention that WWE has yet to suffer from a little healthy competition.
The real problem is that ROH has conducted what equates to flat-out bad business. It's hard enough to find anything from them on the Internet, and following a promotion without a television package is expensive—bundling themselves onto HD Net may have put them on television, but it did nothing to advance the product.
It's still just as expensive to follow, and just as inaccessible to the casual fan—which happens to be the demographic they so desperately need to attract.
So, ROH powers that be, I close with an open letter of sorts in hopes that someone within your company bothers to read it and that you do what I ask:
Please, promote yourself. Make people aware of you and what you are. Get on a station that has some relevance.
Make people know about you.
Make people aware that you exist and that your talent is damn good.
Invest in yourself and reap longterm benefits later.
Stop languishing in the dark and come grab some spotlight from the struggling giants of WWE and TNA, they and wrestling fandom need it.
As for the rest of the readers: Educate yourselves about ROH and about other independent promotions.
Most of them are quite watchable and often even feature a novel concept called wrestling—something that happens will diminishing frequency on WWE programming and was last seen on TNA sometime around the Main Event Mafia's debut.
Check out their website, look on youtube for matches, heck if you're in the area of a taping, go see a show. It's wrestling entertainment in a format that most of us aren't even used to anymore.
Do it for yourself; just because ROH is handicapping themselves doesn't mean they have to die immediately—besides, your inner wrestling fan will thank me.
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