With the pandemic hurting all industries, the one industry that has tried to evolve is Professional Wrestling. At the forefront of this is WWE, and the company has always tried to be innovative.
The one behind this in WWE is Rajan Mehta, WWE’s 16 year vet and chief product and technology officer. Rajan Mehta recently spoke to Sport Techie about WWE’s current presentation and how it will look in the years to come.
Rajan Mehta said,
“We take pride in how we’ve operated through COVID-19; we tried to innovate every portion of our organization,” said Rajan. “It’s important to create a diversion in these hard times and we took that to heart: we never stopped producing content and our weekly shows. We were really excited about that. Back in March, we moved content creation to Orlando without fans, central personnel only. And most recently with the ThunderDome at Amway, we are able to have 1,000 fans in attendance at any given time. When I look at what we did, at our technology and production capabilities, I feel like we set the bar.”
“The ability to try and bring fans to our environment and give the energy of what WWE is—it feels great to watch. Part of what we do is create this energy at WWE and it ties into our overall production value.”
With the future still uncertain, Rajan likes to focus on the words of a classic cartoon character, Yogi Bear.
“I always like to quote Yogi Berra when people ask me about predictions. He said, ’It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’ But if you look at what we’ve done over the last several months from a content perspective, I can see some of that continuing into the future from a production standpoint. From a technology standpoint, we’ve gained a lot of information from a remote working and production/editing perspective, and some of that could live on.
“We’re living in a world where things have changed so much. Right now, this virtual audience we’ve built out has been really impactful. There’s been a desire to watch sports, and part of that is the interaction you can have with fans, and I think what we’ve done with the ThunderDome has been phenomenal. A few years ago, direct-to-consumer technologies helped broaden the sports and entertainment world. The evolution of sports production will continue. That video quality and immersion will continue to grow and with the 5G rollout, that evolutionary stuff is going to take another leap forward.”
WWE has set up residency at the Amway Center in Orlando, Florida, the current home of ThunderDome until the end of October 2020. Once this is up, it will be interesting to see in what direction WWE go, especially with AEW having fans back in the arena.
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