New Japan owner Takaaki Kidani, announcing his goals of surpassing WWE and UFC as the No. 1 sports entertainment group in the world, copied WWE with the announcement on 12/1 of New Japan World, a streaming video service at
http://njpwworld.com that will air all of its major shows, even down to the monthly price of 999 yen.
The service launched immediately after the announcement of the press conference, and was accessible worldwide. The next day, Kidani, without giving any numbers, said they were blown away by the number of sign-ups outside of Japan.
Kidani stated the first year goal was 100,000 subscribers, figuring at the time that almost all subscriptions would come from Japan, and figured they could eventually do several hundred thousand subscribers with strong international growth, and in particular brought up eventually having English language announcers for major shows and English subtitles, similar to how the show on AXS television would be done. He’s hopeful that the service, which will include all major shows as well as the weekly one hour television show World Pro Wrestling (although it appears they will run one month behind) will help international expansion, which is the group’s current focus.
What’s notable at the press conference is that they didn’t push that for the first time ever, the company will have a regular television show in the U.S.
Kidani said that they right now are the No. 1 company in the world when it comes to the actual wrestling product, but they are behind WWE when it comes to business.
Like with WWE, they are undercutting their PPV price, and will be airing their version of WrestleMania, the Wrestle Kingdom 9 show on 1/4 at the Tokyo Dome, with a two-hour pre-game show and four hour main show, on New Japan World, both live and with archives put up immediately after the show.
The service is priced at essentially the same price as the WWE Network and UFC network are for monthly subscriptions. Unlike both, they are including all of their up-to-date content with the exception of the one hour television show, on the service. In that sense, it is like UFC’s Latin America channel. Also different from the WWE service, this is no 24 hour live programming, and also different from both, the library is only New Japan content as opposed to purchased rights for footage from other companies. Also, unlike UFC, there is no price break for ordering multiple months, at least at first. Because the yen has fallen against the American dollar of late, the price at press time was $8.42 U.S., $9.54 Canadian and 5.36 British pounds, per month.
This undercuts Jeff Jarrett’s English language produced PPVs on television throughout North America and on the Flipps App on the Internet worldwide outside of Japan, which was charging $34.95 for the show alone. Last year’s Tokyo Dome was 3500 yen on either PPV or iPPV in Japan, and $35 for iPPV in the U.S. through Ustream. Essentially, like WWE has done with its PPV business, New Japan is killing its two-year-old iPPV business.
In this U.S., the mentality has been that it’s easier to get people to order a PPV on television as opposed to through a streaming service, although WWE may have sped up the curve on changing that one. ROH was doing maybe 2,000 iPPV buys for big shows, and did six times that on traditional PPV with a weaker show, its first time out of the blocks. However, WWE moving from PPV to the network saw regular PPV drop down to 21,000 buys in North America for Hell in a Cell, and that includes Canada, where the WWE is theoretically not even available to be ordered in 80 percent of the homes, and it’s a scaled down version.
But ultimately, the regular television PPV for New Japan is likely to have a short run. For the 1/4 show, while the super hardcores in the U.S. and Canada will order the network, a large part of the television audience won’t likely even know there is a New Japan World service, and for most, the Japanese commentary is a deal breaker and Jim Ross is a positive. But in the long run, once New Japan World starts broadcasting in English, people will learn to stream it for the lower price, provided there are no technical issues like what badly damaged ROH for years. The idea of Jarrett being able to build a PPV franchise with New Japan, which was a longshot but not an impossibility, via the traditional PPV route, seems far more than a longshot today.
