Stephanie McMahon On If There Will Be Programming Changes With Peacock TV Deal

While chatting with Bloomberg Business in Sports, WWE CBO Stephanie McMahon talked about lessons WWE is taking from the Super Bowl. Like that event, WWE's upcoming Wrestlemania 37 will take place at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay.

"We are grateful to be following in the Super Bowl's footsteps," said Stephanie. "In terms of the stadium itself we worked with all the local organizing, commissions, sports authorities, the mayor's office, to develop the best plan we could.

"We're going to be providing masks, the same way the NFL did. All the health and temperature screenings. We're going to have a similar capacity for both nights, though the scaling will be different because we can have people on the floor."

Later, while discussing WWE's deal with streaming service Peacock, Stephanie was asked how this would affect the broadcasts of RAW, Smackdown and NXT. The short answer: it won't.

"Monday Night RAW is still be on USA Network. It's still live, every Monday Night night, 8 to 11," Stephanie confirmed. "NXT is newer to USA, but it's live every Wednesday 8 to 10. And Smackdown is still on Fox, live every Friday, 8 to 10.

"So our core flagship programming is still with our partners. And our pay-per-views and all our shoulder content is now living on Peacock."

All of this led to Stephanie being asked what the economic challenges were for WWE in this environment.

"Of course we always want to drive the best economics we can for WWE and our shareholders," Stephanie said. "But certainly this deal with Peacock is great for us financially. And we have a number of different initiatives and partnerships we'll be rolling out.

"But we really do need to get our fans back to our events. That's critical to our ongoing success. We talk about the effects of the pandemic, a lot that we're feeling in 2021 as opposed to 2020. We have a lot of offset costs because we were producing out of the Performance Center for so long. So yeah; we really need to get our fans back to our shows."

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Bloomberg Business of Sports and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription