Speaking during the Netflix Q4 2024 earnings call, co-CEO
Ted Sarandos was full of praise for WWE and the great start
Raw had on their streaming service, adding that the company
will help to grow WWE’s popularity outside the United
States.

Sarandos said that the day after Raw airs live, they see
about a 25% jump in viewership coming from countries outside
North America. Raw airs in the very early hours of the
morning for European countries and later in the morning as
you move to time zones in the east.

“All these years that WWE has been on television, very
successful,” Sarandos told investors. “Good example about
the kind of X factor that is Netflix, we did a press day to
kind of introduce the press to the sport because the press
didn’t pay much attention to it — to the sport until it got
to Netflix. So they basically — we had a huge attendance of
reporters from all over the world who were learning what
this game, what this is about. So to me, I think that’s the
first step of the X factor that is Netflix for that sport,
and people will see that applied.”


He also compared the strategy they are using with WWE to
that they used for Formula 1 with the Drive to Survive
series which catapulted F1’s popularity in America.

“So I feel like we have the ability to do that with WWE. We
give a bigger audience for it in the U.S. and blow it up
outside of the U.S.,” he continued. “We also like it because
for a sport, it also has a 40-person writer room. So it’s
much closer to our core wheelhouse of creating and
storytelling.”

Netflix also announced a price hike to their service in the
United States after reporting nearly 19 million new
subscribers to the service. This was the largest
subscription jump ever during a three-month period and sends
the total of worldwide subscribers to over 300 million.