This is a very interesting piece of news about the WWE Network and WrestleMania in this week's Observer that isn't getting a lot of attention:
"Another point [with regards to this year's WrestleMania] is that even though the company claimed record viewership by adding up worldwide PPVs (690,000) and network subscribers (667,000) and getting 1,357,000, there were actually fewer people watching, even with the lower price, than two years earlier at full price. We don’t have figures but there were far less than 667,000 homes actually watching WrestleMania on the network and one person who did know said that there were more homes, and probably a lot more people, watching in 2012. First off, there were the network subscribers who attended live who would have been counted in 2014 figures whereas in other years they wouldn’t be counted (although in fairness, many of them attending live may have ordered the replay in 2012). You also have the network subscribers who still ordered on PPV, not trusting the technology or they didn’t have the technology to watch it on their TVs and had friends over, so those homes are also counted twice in 2014. Even if that wasn’t the case, when you decrease the price point that much, even if the number was the highest, it’s not a fair comparison."