The night before Thanksgiving, mythical wife and I were talking about how it might be nice for the girls to wake up and watch some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; they might be entertaining by the giant floats, maybe they’ll see some characters they recognize like Bluey or Pikachu, and the real motive from mythical wife was that HUNTR/X from K-Pop Demon Hunters was performing but the reality is that my kids love the film as well. A cursory search showed that we could watch it on Peacock, which was good because we did have a Peacock login.
That is, until the following morning when I booted up the projector and opened up Peacock, there was the lock icon on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Seriously? A paywall for this?
But then I noticed that pretty much everything else had the lock icon on it. Feeling a sense of dread, I clicked on the WWE tab, and sure enough, all of the wrestling content that I pretty much use Peacock exclusively for, all locked. I double-checked the login to make sure that I was still logged in, and we were. I logged out and logged back in, and couldn’t even make it to the menus I was in previously, because I was met with the plan options, and it’s apparent that Peacock had kiboshed the free tier that I was on previously, and it quickly dawned on me that short of RAW on Netflix which has been more mediocre than Kentucky Fried Chicken, I was now incapable of watching any WWE programming.
Thankfully for the morning of Thanksgiving, I could find some free livestreams of the parade on YouTube, so the kids could still see floats and characters, but it definitely left a sour taste in my mouth and started churning some gears in writing out this post in my head.
When the WWE sold and TKO came into existence, yeah, they made a whole lot of shitty business decisions that really fucked over a lot of wrestling fans. But most of all that shit seemed to pertain to the live experience and I’ve long since cared about live events, and said that as long as they don’t fuck with my viewing experience, I’d be okay.
But then the E sold all their premium live events to ESPN, which held them hostage behind a tier-2 paywall that I didn’t have access to, so now I couldn’t see any of the big shows anymore, which definitely sucks. But Peacock still would get all of the NXT shows which I always thought were usually better in the first place, plus they still had an extensive library of original content, so I would make do with just using RAW to keep abreast on the product.
And now Peacock has turned full heel and restructured their tiers to ensure that people like me no longer had a means to access WWE and NXT content, so again, my only remaining means of watching WWE product is now solely Netflix, and RAW hasn’t really been particularly good since it debuted and Hulk Hogan was still alive and got booed the fuck out of Los Angeles.
So, like the subject of this post says, I guess it’s time to go full tryhard fan mode into AEW, seeing as how I can still access their product reliably between HBO Max, where they run both their television and PPV products. Or perhaps I can log in through a tv provider and get the AMC app and see if they’ll allow me to watch TNA. Shit, I have a Roku, I could feasibly get NWA Powerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr for free there too.
But fuck if I’m going to pay even more money for 2-3 different streaming platforms just to watch WWE.
As I’ve said multiple times, the streaming wars have gotten so out of hand, that we’re rapidly approaching the precipice where the ensuing result is going to be a company to emerge from the ashes, where they’ll consolidate ALL networks through a singular service, for a single price, but all programming will be supported by advertising.
And it will be called . . . cable2.
