While most of the headlines coming out of Mark Shapiro's Wednesday comments have revolved around Vince McMahon, the TKO COO did reveal an interesting fact about the initial WWE/Netflix talks. Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media & Telecom Conference, Shapiro said that in the company's talks with the streaming giant, NXT was the original point of discussion. The two sides eventually came to a five-year, $5.2 billion deal to bring Raw to Netflix domestically starting in January 2025 in addition to all WWE programming, including PLEs, to Netflix internationally. Shapiro said with the deal, they "cracked the code" with bringing live sports to Netflix and that the partnership alone "de-risked" the UFC/WWE merger that spawned TKO. Shapiro is bullish on the deal that was driven by WWE CEO Nick Khan and TKO CFO Andrew Schleimer, mainly because of his confidence in Netflix's marketing. He specifically mentioned WWE being highly visible when users log in to the service. He said it's a good neighborhood
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