All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan shocked the world just five nights ago on “Dynamite” when he announced that he had purchased Ring of Honor.
On the latest episode of his “83 Weeks” Podcast, former WCW President Eric Bischoff sounded off on the purchase. Bischoff would mention why it indeed made more sense for AEW to purchase ROH instead of Vince McMahon and WWE. This coming after reports circulated that the WWE showed interest in purchasing the ROH after it went on hiatus back in November.
“You could argue that because of the power of Peacock and that platform that any additional content might be a good strategic move for them, but it makes more sense for Tony [Khan],” Bischoff said. “Given his roster, I would agree with that absolutely. If it made sense to anybody, it made sense to Tony Khan.”
During Sunday night’s AEW Revolution Post Show Media Scrum, Khan mentioned a little about his relationship with the Sinclair Broadcasting group and why they were excited to work with him. It’s worth noting that this podcast was recorded after the purchase and prior to AEW Revolution on Sunday night in preparation for “83 Weeks” weekly Monday release schedule. Eric Bischoff gave his thoughts on the ROH/Sinclair relationship and why he does not hold much weight in the partnership.
“There’s not a lot of value there.. Optimistically, because there’s so much, we don’t know, Tony could have an awesome plan in his back pocket that we don’t know about. Now we’ve got this amazing roster of talent and I don’t really have enough television on TBS to take advantage of it, let’s start another promotion on another television network. So, you’re going to produce another television show, assuming it’s exclusive and that talent that’s assigned to that Ring of Honor show, now you can take advantage of a huge roster with some great talent. But you’ve got to pay to produce that show and there is not enough return on the investment on that show if you expect to monetize it on the Sinclair network because guess what, that’s why they sold it.”
Back in the fall, some may remember, Tony Khan teased a potential deal with Warner Media, a streaming service agreement. Eric then continued to talk about the ROH purchase, stating he thought it was a good deal simply from the ROH video library acquisition and possible streaming deal. Then he mentioned his fear of not many fans in the United States knowing what Ring of Honor wrestling is and how the deal might not mean much in the early stages.
“In the end of it, all the conversation about was it a good deal for Tony or not, I think it was a good deal. If Tony’s goal ultimately is to build, independent of Turner, is to build his own streaming platform? Absolutely the acquisition of Ring of Honor makes sense. It’s not going to make financial sense in the short term, it’s just not. How many people around in the United States television viewing audience, how many of them even know what Ring of Honor is. Short term, it is not going to be profitable but three years from now, five years from now, seven, 10 years out… Because streaming platforms are popping up every day. That’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger and guess what? Content becomes more and more valuable over time. Content that probably wasn’t worth anything five years ago conceivably is not worth quite a bit of money because the market has grown and the ability to feed it with content has not.
My opinion, short term that library is going to mean absolutely nothing and in a lot of cases it looks like shit. You couldn’t do anything with it anyway, it looks like it was built on a phone in a high school gym. But there’s still some great content there.”
Bischoff then offered up his opinion on what he would do if he were in Tony Khan and AEW’s shoes. Specifically, rehashing old ROH storylines, or using wrestlers ROH backgrounds and history to add something to a current storyline. Again, this was recorded BEFORE last night’s “Revolution” PPV and released the day after, and yet that is EXACTLY what the world witnessed with CM Punk coming out to the ring with his old ROH theme in new gear that was identical to his old ROH ring attire.
“Here’s perhaps a short-term play that will matter with the Ring of Honor acquisition,” Bischoff said. “If Tony is able to, and his team, is able to figure out a way to use ROH and his legacy and the fact that some of its talent that’s in AEW got their start early on in ROH, there’s a lot of connective tissue between Tony’s current roster and the legacy of ROH. What if they’re able to use that and use Ring of Honor as a backdrop to launch stories from? Because now you’ve got a lot of people, much like they did with CM Punk and Eddie, which only lasted for about 45 seconds, it was still pretty fucking cool!
Well now you’ve got ROH, access to the library to use to help fill in the backstory holes that you need to tell a really good story in 2022. I think that’s a short-term opportunity. I don’t know if it justifies what the cost was because we don’t know what that was, but it doesn’t fucking matter, you’ve got it now, use it to the best of your abilities. Again, great stories have great backstory, creating a new story out of thin air is challenging, it’s obviously done all the time. Now you’ve got a real backstory that you can enhance to launch new stories from and that’s what I hope we see.”
(h/t to 83 Weeks and to Wrestling Inc for the transcriptions.)
