Jeff Jarrett is in New York City right now and sources close to the situation have told us that he is meeting with Viacom executives. One source has told us that Jarrett is meeting with Viacom about getting TNA a clearance on Spike TV, possibly on Monday night to replace WWE programming when it leaves the network in September. Jarrett's being in New York has been anything but a secret, and at least some people close to the situation feel that Viacom wants WWE to know that they are meeting with Jarrett since there are hard feelings between the companies given the way their negotiations recently broke off. It will be interesting to see what happens here because if TNA is able to secure a slot on Spike, especially on Monday nights, it could completely change the landscape of the business. On a related note, there is still no new cable deal for WWE to announce at this time.
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Am I alone in being somewhat hopeful they do get it?
If the USA deal is good, and then TNA's on Spike, I'm all for it. However, it wouldn't restart the wars unless the financial backers really want to get shelling out. So far they have yet to take away anyone from WWE who wasn't fired/irrelevant. Viacom probably wouldn't want to put their money into TNA, unless there are really, really hard feelings.
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In the Smackdown Is Doomed Thread, didn't we go over the point that Viacom was looking to detatch themselves from wrestling, not just the WWE? So if that's correct, they're not going to replace one wrestling program with the stepchild wrestling program.
Plus, here's how the headline on pwi.com read:
JEFF JARRETT IS IN NEW YORK MEETING WITH VIACOM - ONE SOURCE SAYS TNA COULD BE TAKING WWE'S TIME SLOT ON SPIKE TV
Something tells me ONE SOURCE= Ryder
EDIT: I IDed the wrong thread and it was Viacom that made the statement about wrestling, not subsidiary Spike TV its ownself.
(edited by Blanket Jackson on 29.3.05 1555) "Meet the kite-eating tree you son of a bitch!"
Having a meeting with Viacom is a long way from being on Mondays (or anydays) come September. If this is anything, it's the first step in a long process which may or not be fruitful.
ECW met with plenty of TV networks, and they didn't get anything out of it. Easy to read a lot into something like this, but there's not actually much here, yet.
Even at it's worse going against WWF/E, WCW was at least partially interesting...TNA wouldn't have a chance in bloody hell. Especially with Dusty Rhodes making everything reek of suck.
SpikeTV is a network with a severe identity crisis. It spent three years limping along as a "mainstream" network under a name most people identified with rednecks and country music because of the initials, then tried to become the "first TV network for men". All this time, their only constant was pro wrestling.
If they can replace expensive wrestling programming with similar programming that costs maybe one-third the amount to produce, they'd be dumb not to do it. Don't expect a TNA show on SpikeTV to be live every week, though - it'd make much more sense for it them to retain the current taping schedule, and air the finished product on the weekends.
Originally posted by Alex Marvez & Dave Meltzer From a Spike source, Jeff Jarrett had a brief meeting with a mid-level executive yesterday about getting on the network. There wasn't any real interest expressed from the Spike side. The discussions were not about a Monday night time slot. The feeling from the network is even if TNA could do a 1.5 in a good time slot, and its track record on FSN indicates it couldn't come close to that number, Spike could get the same rating with a McGyver repeat at no cost, and get far more advertising revenue because it's hard to sell wrestling.
So according to this basically Spike can look elsewhere for the same ratings and get get more money.
Could be exactly like this. Remember when everyone thought Sting was with the nWo because he attacked guys like Arn Anderson and Rey Mysterio? But it turned out he only attacked them because they attacked him first.