Netflix CEO Praises WWE Raw's Performance After Debut

"WWE is off to a great start. Our first week, we drew about 5 million views, which is about two times the audience that Monday Night Raw was getting a linear television, pretty consistent with how we modeled it, how we'd hoped to build the audience for the league," he said. "We also saw that the non-live viewing, so in the day after the live event, our viewing grew by 25 percent, mostly outside of the US time zones. So this is a new viewing in the UK and Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, particularly big markets. So we're really thrilled to see how that's going so far."

Sarandos also noted the company feels it is getting value on its investment in WWE based on the demographics being brought in so far.

"In the US, our viewing of Monday Night Raw was as big as the Monday Night Raw viewing has been in five years. So we're super thrilled about how that's going and how that's coming out," he said. "Again, just not to be overly repetitive, but we are not, we're going to be mindful of the bottom line and it's really important that those economics do work and that the big league sports, full league, full season economics are very hard to make work. And so for us, we want to be able to bring value to the sport like we have to date with WWE certainly, but like we have with the NFL too, where we were basically able to bring a big audience, a young audience, a more global audience than linear television, but that has to be reflected in the deal as well.

The entire WWE library is not yet available on Netflix in the United States, but largely is internationally.