Netflix just spent $5 billion on 10 years of WWE Raw

Netflix is spending more than $5 billion on a deal that’ll bring WWE‘s long-running live show Raw to its platform for an entire decade.

Raw has been airing on network TV since its debut in 1993, but starting in January 2025, it’ll be Netflix’s marquee live sports program, with new episodes airing weekly in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Latin America. Netflix will air about 150 hours of exclusive Raw content per year, per the Wall Street Journal.

The deal also includes international rights to WWE’s annual professional wrestling event WrestleMania, plus distribution for other WWE shows like Smackdown and NXT.

This is one of Netflix’s biggest deals ever, and by far its largest deal for live sports to date. Raw‘s previous deal, with NBCUniversal‘s USA Network, was a five-year agreement valued at $1.3 billion. That deal, unlike Netflix’s, didn’t include any international distribution rights.

The Netflix deal “fundamentally alters and strengthens the media landscape, significantly expands the reach of WWE, and brings weekly live appointment viewing to Netflix,” Mark Shapiro

, CEO and president at WWE’s parent company TKO, said in a statement.

Raw moving to Netflix was foreshadowed a bit in 2023, when WWE president Nick Khan said it was “just a matter of time before Netflix goes live,” and suggested Raw would be a good fit for the streamer.

WWE selling rights to a streaming service rather than a traditional network probably isn’t a surprise to folks who’ve been paying attention to WWE’s digital content game plan. The org has been carving a real presence for itself on YouTube and TikTok over the past few years. In 2019, it began uploading over 500 videos to YouTube per month, a strat that’s helped put it up to nearly 100 million subscribers and over 600 million views a month.