After years of characteristic bluster about founding its own television network, World Wrestling Entertainment will finally back up its bravado in 2014 – but with a twist.

At last week’s CES in Las Vegas, WWE executives Vince McMahon, Stephanie McMahon and Paul Levesque announced that the 24/7 WWE Network will launch in the United States on February 24. Only, it won’t appear in your local cable package, but in a newly developed streaming TV app that will work in web browsers, Android and iOS devices, and on TV boxes including Roku, PlayStation and Microsoft.

In eschewing cable entirely, WWE has placed enormous faith in the willingness of its audience to engage with new media. Whether wrestling fans are the most tech-savvy content consumers or not is kind of beside the point – studies show that the majority of viewers in general still prefer to watch live content at the time of broadcast, on a TV set. Sure, that number is dwindling, but is it dwindling fast enough to discount it entirely?

WWE thinks it is, or it at least thinks it can convince its fans stuck in their old media ways to see the online light. In addition to the expected round-the-clock streaming content offered on the app, as well as more than 100,000 hours of on-demand content, the company is wooing potential subscribers by including its monthly pay-per-view specials as part of the deal. Typically available one at a time for $44.95 each, the price of the specials will now be wrapped into the network’s monthly subscription fee of $9.99 a month.

But while that seems like a pretty sweet arrangement on the surface, it’s really only beneficial to hardcore fans who buy multiple pay-per-view specials a year. Certainly, perhaps more than most sports, WWE has its fair share of loyalists, but it also has slightly more mellow fans who are content to watch the free WWE broadcasts that already air on USA and Syfy – and only watch a pay-per-view special every now and again, if at all. For those viewers who wouldn’t be purchasing pay-per-view anyway, the streaming fee represents one more thing for which they have to pay. In fact, it’s shockingly high, especially in light of the hullabaloo that went down after ESPN raised its average monthly rate to a measly-by-comparison $5.54 per household.

Sure, subscribers will have access to an unprecedented amount of wrestling action whenever they want it, but does WWE even have the resources to supply ‘round-the-clock content without stretching itself too thin? Even if they can generate content that is consistently, just plain old “good,” some viewers will expect consistently amazing content for a price double that of ESPN’s – and that is impossible to deliver for any network, even one with the resources of Disney behind it.

In placing itself fully in the digital realm, the WWE Network launches from an exciting, dynamic place, giving itself more options both creatively and financially than it ever would have on cable. What it’s doing will become the norm in the coming years, but until then, many, many viewers are still transitioning from their Old Media ways. To make up for the loss of its pay-per-view revenue and break even on the new venture, WWE has stated it needs to crack 800,000 digital subscribers. Most definitely, there will be wrestling fans excited enough to sign on come February. The question is, will there be close to a million of them?

[Images courtesy of WWE.]

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