Saturday, April 14, 2012

iPPV: Is YouTube the future?

Ring of Honor recently had technical difficulties ruin both of their annual Wrestlemania weekend Internet Pay-Per-View events. This led them to splitting ways with their iPPV distributor GoFightLive earlier this week. The most peculiar thing about severing ties is that ROH have their Border Wars event scheduled in less than a month on May 12th.


The best possible option would be YouTube, which announced this week they are now offering live pay-per-view as an option for YouTube Partners who also offer YouTube Rentals (Which makes me wonder, why hasn't ROH already taken advantage of this service? They have an insane amount of content and utilizing YouTube would increase their search engine results too. I have a feeling ROH has never been the most forward thinking company in technology). Although I was unable to find any information about the monetization of this program, I did find YouTube's Live Stream Partner Guide which explains a bit of the program. Along with this new service, YouTube also launched WireCast, an application designed so that live  events can be produces directly from any desktop. While I question the features and level of quality used in this program, it does offer some other features that are incredibly unique including real time analytics.

YouTube is the most visited media site and third most visited site in the entire world, add to this that they are owned by the most visited website in the world. ROH has a bit of a SEO problem, as the first page of responses after searching Ring of Honor into Google contains links to the Dallas Cowboys, some fantasy RPG game about wizards or something and the Phoenix Suns. The second page doesn't get any better with more irrelevant links. Now it's obvious that a lot of sports teams have something called a "Ring of Honor" for exceptional players, but this term is generic and should not take precedence over a corporate owned BRAND in a Google search. YouTube also is trusted and well known by people, looking for an event on the site won't be difficult as many are extremely familiar with it.


The other benefit of using YouTube would be their ubiquity on smartphones, tablets, smart tvs, set-top boxes and video game consoles. There is now many different ways to watch YouTube content, some of which are much more desirable for a product like professional wrestling. Since device support is an ongoing process, many of the apps currently used do not support the one-year-old YouTube Live content. This is something that will inevitably be fixed by the company. Ring of Honor also would have the ability to stream in 720p HD, which they never seemed to reach while with GFL.


It feels that they will choose World Wrestling Network, the Internet Pay-Per-View company started by former Ring of Honor co-founder and booker Gabe Sapolsky, who has had previous experience in the media end from his time in ECW and RF Video. Gabe was fired from Ring of Honor to everyone's shock in 2008. At the time he was widely considered by those in the industry as one of (if not) the best bookers of the past decade. During his tenure CM Punk, Samoa Joe, Bryan Danielson, Nigel McGuinness and countless others were brought to prominence because of good storylines and even better matches. Since ROH is no longer owned by Cary Silkin (who fired Sapolsky), Gabe has stated that it is an entirely new company and it seems like there could be a working relationship if the interest is there.

Another option mentioned by some would be HybridEnt.TV, best known for streaming Combat Zone Wrestling and other small wrestling organizations. Honestly, I feel this is the worst option by far. The website design is hideous, it actually hurts to look at the screen and navigate the page. It also may not be the best for a corporate entity to associate themselves with a company who thought it would be a good idea to hang someone from the ceiling with meat hooks. I know very little about this site and really don't think it will be something I will ever use, it does not seem to have any method of watching the product other than on a computer which is a bigger deal than most people seem to realize.

There are of course other options such as UStream or Justin.TV, but none of them bring the benefits that will come along if Ring of Honor were to use YouTube Live for their iPPV content in the future.