During a recent episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff spoke on his idea to relaunch WCW prior to the WWE buying the company. Here’s what he had to say:
I wanted to go dark. I petitioned for the longer we could go dark, the better. But there are some realities there – some cashflow realities that won the argument. I think it was in May, and we were gonna launch on a pay-per-view. My hope was by going dark, the absence makes the heart grow fonder factor would’ve started to kick in. In my opinion, had we stayed dark until the fall, it would’ve been even better but it just wasn’t practical from a cashflow perspective. And there with issues with TNT and programming. So, the compromise was May. I wanted to do it on pay-per-view, and my reason for it is because we would’ve had sufficient promotional time on TNT promoting that pay-per-view. So, the awareness, the buzz, the energy, the anticipation that we would’ve been able to build promoting it.
By launching on pay-per-view instead of television, I’m not only getting the television promotion I’m gonna get anyway because of the deal we structured, but I’m gonna get all these other opportunities from pay-per-view companies around the United States generating the launch of this new version of WCW. It was a strategic decision because I thought it would benefit us in the long haul in terms of coverage. Fewer people would’ve watched it, and that was OK. If we had launched on TNT, we would’ve done two and a half or three million viewers. We would’ve had substantially less than two million viewers on pay-per-view. But the promotion that we would’ve enjoyed on the way to the pay-per-view, and the buzz we would’ve hopefully created at the pay-per-view, we would’ve followed up on the following week on Nitro when we finally did make it to air.
You can listen HERE.
Credit: 83 Weeks. H/T 411Mania.