ROH May Have Lost TNA Lead-In Spot

[ABMorales787]

According to recent television listings, Destination America will not be airing Ring of Honor as a lead-in to Impact Wrestling going forward. As of now, the show is only scheduled in the 11:00 p.m. ET timeslot following Impact, which effectively cuts the viewership and ratings for the show almost in half.

It would not surprise me one bit if this is true. This trigger happy network showed pretty quickly it has no clue how to work with wrestling or even primetime programing in itself. No sense of patience, investment or anything really. ROH doesn't even cost a dime to produce. Yeah, advertising numbers, yada yada. But Jesus Christ 7 months for TNA. 1 and a half for ROH. That's just preposterous.

Or are they making way for GFW? Even so, that's still pretty terrible business sense.

 

[Jack-Hammer]

Destination America is pretty much the bottom rung of the ladder when it comes to cable television because they just don't have...well much of anything really when you get right down to it except TNA and ROH. TNA was consistently the top drawing show on the network and ROH's numbers haven't been far behind. Generally speaking, Impact Wrestling's first airing would usually draw somewhere in the 330,000 to 430,000 range while the replay would sometimes draw in another 100,000 or so. Sometimes it'd be more, sometimes less but usually in that neighborhood. ROH's total audience would be somewhere in the 350,000 range for both shows, it's not unusual for the replay to draw close to what the original did.

Generally speaking, these numbers don't even register as a blip on the radar compared to just about any other cable network during prime time hours but they're bigger than anything else DA has, at least to my understanding. You'd think that a rinky dink network with nothing else going on whatsoever would be thrilled to have ANYTHING that consistently draws audiences in the mid six figures.

 

[stingray11214]

DA is Discovery's "throwaway" channel. They put nonsense that will not get aired elsewhere. It is designed to lose money and be a writeoff. Problem is that the wrestling programs are actually making them money, which in turn, hurts their bottom line as the purpose of a writeoff on the ol' taxes.

 

[The Dragon Saga]

http://pwinsider.com/article/95447/...a-and-what-is-going-on-with-the-move.html?p=1

As we reported over the weekend, Ring Of Honor on Destination America will lose its 8 p.m. airing for at least two weeks, starting on 7/29. Destination America wants to try other shows in the 8 p.m. hour, before Impact Wrestling, and see how they do with ROH getting the slot back depending how other shows do. The change was communicated to ROH in advance, unlike when the Network moved TNA’s Impact from Friday to Wednesday last month.

There has been a lot of speculation over the weekend as to what the move means to ROH, TNA and wrestling on the network overall. Here’s my take on the issue.

ROH:

ROH signed a 26 week deal with Destination America, which runs through the end of November. Obviously, the network is honoring its end by still airing the program. At the end of the deal, should the sides go separate ways, ROH will be fine. As it now, ROH is getting extra money from the network with no extra expense to them. They run their show on their stations over the weekend, then get paid by the network to air a rerun of the program on Wednesday. All of the revenue from the deal is incremental for ROH. If they part ways, they are back where they were, as content for Sinclair stations around the country. Plus, they now have national exposure on a network that reaches around 50% of the country and could be appealing to another network. If the sides reach a new deal, they obviously keep benefitting from the incremental income that it brings in.

TNA:

Unlike ROH, the revenue coming in from Destination America is the primary funding source that is keeping the company going. As it is, TNA has been forced to drastically alter how it does business due to the drop off in rights fees that occurred when they left Spike TV. Earlier this year, a memo circulated via the network saying that TNA would be canceled at the end of September. A week later, Destination America brought ROH on board and moved TNA to Wednesday nights, with no advanced notice to the company. It’s fair to say that if the network decided to move away from wrestling, TNA would find itself in critical, critical condition. If they were not able to find another network to take them on, either the Carter family would have to pour money into the TNA to keep it alive in hopes of finding a new television home, they would have to find another investor, or they would go out of business.

Destination America:

There is no positive way to look at this move. If the network were happy with and committed to the Wednesday night wrestling block, they would not have started testing shows in the 8 p.m. time slot. They would have left the night in tact. The fact that they are doing this is telling. It’s no secret that since bringing TNA on earlier this year, the network has felt that wrestling has underperformed and not met their expectations in terms of viewership vs. dollars paid for the programming. Given that they have an out clause with TNA, they could stop airing Impact at any time and move away from wrestling altogether by December, when ROH’s deal is up, if they choose to (and that is provided that they don’t have an out clause to ROH).

The next few months will be watched very closely to see what Destination America does. If they move away from wrestling, ROH will be fine while it very well may sound the death knell for TNA.

If I was ROH, I wouldn't be worried. They still have a show available to people who want to find it on cable which is what the show was to begin with when it went to Destination America anyway. Syndication makes up over 60% of their weekly audience anyway so losing the timeslot for now shouldn't effect them, in fact depending how the ratings do condensing both viewerships to one timeslot may help. It's an interesting situation anyway.

 

[rmp0012002]

They are just showing ROH at 11 and cutting the 8pm slot before TNA. I would think ROH would be a great warm up for TNA but I just think DA is lost at how to present wrestling. DA for the most part is hillbilly TV but if it was the Alaskan Alien Yeti ghost chaser federation it would get a major push.

 

[Lowdown]

This is confusing to me. You would think if both wrestling shows bring in decent viewership then there's no reason to play musical chairs with the programming. Once in a while way before they started airing wrestling I watched food shows or natural disaster shows on DA. Aside from that there was no appeal to the channel at all.

 

[Adriang4]

Well that sucks .. we need ROH to do well for the good of the inudstry.

 

[stingray11214]

It is probably because Sinclair will not pony up for the airtime for 8pm. Prime time airtime purchase is very expensive. DA was not going to pay for RoH repeats.