Sky Sports are creating specialist sports channels in a shake up that will make it cheaper for people wanting to only watch certain sports. They currently show WWE programming on their channels and this will continue on Sky Sports Arena rather than have a dedicated wrestling channel.
The Guardian spoke to Richard Broughton, a director at Ampere Analysis and he feels that having genre-specific channels is something that will make it better for the consumer as they can just subscribe to Formula 1, football, golf or cricket and Sky can get an accurate forecast of profit and loss rather than just have subscribers pay over £40 a month for all sports.
So what does that mean for wrestling? Well, Sky Sports Arena is for Wrestling, Tennis and Rugby. Sky recently stopped airing the US Open for tennis after 25 years so is this where they’re putting the sports they’re not willing to invest in? Back when TNA Impact was on freeview Challenge TV, it was getting more viewers in the UK than WWE. The TV rights contract for WWE in the UK come up in 2019, so it will be at least 18 months to find out what Sky’s current view of WWE programming is.