Last night, the WWE teased what many of us have known was coming for quite some time: The WWE Network. The tease is early, and I don’t believe that that is the final logo for what could be the most important shift WWE has ever made. I also don’t think that ‘WWE Network’ is the best name for the channel. ‘Network’ sounds so news-y and hasn’t been considered a relevant buzzword in several generations. Still, what is this channel? What makes it different from WWE’s current offerings, and why should we care?

WWE is in an interesting spot. As the only major player in special wrestling, and as the owner of the majority of professional wrestling’s television library, they have a sort of responsibility to make that footage available to interested parties. Professional wrestling, unlike sports (for the most part), also benefits from having a far higher replay value. One of the neat side effects of scripted entertainment, is that a match or show can still be entertaining long after the stories have played out, long after you know who one lost, and long after better shows have arrived. As we pointed out here, there is value in not only great wrestling matches and shows, but also in what’s considered poor wrestling matches and shows. Studying the history of professional wrestling can be a lot of fun, but it’s still difficult to get a full curriculum.

WWE has been slowly ramping up to this point by offering small slivers of what this network promises. WWE 24/7 (now known as Classics on Demand) is an on demand channel you can purchase from your cable company for roughly 10 bucks a month. That channel delivers a new menu of items every month. Think of it like a fancy restaurant. The menu is small and rotates frequently, but the cuts of meat are generally very good, and the service is high-quality. The problem of that channel is that on-demand cable isn’t available everywhere, has a somewhat high paywall, and a dedicated wrestling fan can chew through the monthly content in about two days. Since WWE Classics on Demand is by definition for dedicated WWE fans, offering only a small amount of content—however good—simply isn’t enough. The on-demand idea also only entertains someone who already knows how to explore the history of wrestling. This person knows the value of territorial episodes, the Monday night wars, WWE shows at Boston Gardens and roundtable discussions about certain matches, characters, and movements.

Then, there’s the online offering. WWE.com has for several years hosted a buffet of sorts. Recently updated and far more robust, WWE Greatest Matches is a paywall section of the website that offers a similar experience to the on-demand channel. You still have to know what you’re doing, and you still have to have a basic idea of where the good stuff is. For the money though, the online channel is far better than than on-demand. Not only does every month bring far more content, but older content remains in place instead of disappearing, often for free viewing. Videos that are no longer free to view are available to purchase, which is a decision that makes a lot of sense. A wrestling fan absolutely obsessed with, say, WCCW, isn’t going to have a problem paying two bucks per episode. Greatest Matches has many flaws though, and while some may get fixed over time, there are inherent problems with having an Internet streaming website. Not everyone can afford the high bandwidth required to stream hours and hours and hours of fairly good quality content. Not every computer runs flash very well, either. Finally, the pay wall itself, while fair in my estimation, will always turn off a large portion of the audience that simply refuses to pay to have a faucet turned on. You can read more of my first impressions if you like.

That’s why a cable channel makes sense. Expert level wrestling fans may want a menu to choose from, but I believe the vast majority of wrestling fans would be perfectly happy to simply have a channel with rotating content that they can simply switch on and watch. DVR’s will take care of the specific programming for individual tastes.

That, I believe, is what WWE is looking to fix with this new network coming in 2012. We don’t have any real details about the network thus far, and so everything I say here is an educated guess.

WWE would like to have a wrestling channel. They would like to take advantage of their vast library and leverage it for profit. They believe there is audience out there who will watch it, but perhaps not pay for it. If they did want to pay for it, the on-demand channel and WWE.com’s greatest matches would have probably already sufficed. I’m going to say now that I don’t believe that this will be a pay channel, but it may not be available to all cable subscribers. It will be something similar to, say, the Golf Channel or ESPN Classic. It will exist on a higher channel on cable, undoubtedly in the hundreds, and it will be in HD. It will likely be offered inside a sports package, as well as on its own.

But offering the library in some way is only part of this. If you watch the video that’s available on the WWE Network Facebook page, you hear something really interesting: “The superstars you love. The events you can’t live without. All things WWE. One home.” That’s the pitch for the network, but what does it mean? When the narrator says: “the events you can’t live without”, they show the logos for WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and the Royal Rumble. That tells me that major events will be available on the channel in some fashion. It’s possible that this channel will provide live access to PPV shows, but whether or not this is the case has, in my estimation, everything to do with how happy WWE is to pay PPV fees. But what’s more interesting than that is the last two words: one home. Currently, WWE programming is scattershot across several networks. WWE’s weekly shows are available on two different networks; minor shows are available online, and major events on PPV.

Speaking of television, network regulations force WWE to conform to advertising rules, and commercial times. WWE is a very unique monster, and while it has adapted to different audiences with different tastes, I honestly believe that they would like nothing more than to control the process of distribution so that they can deliver their product in the way they want. The only way to really do that is to have your own network.

Obviously, there are downsides. The networks that run this programming pay WWE for the privilege. If you’ve read the quarterly reports, you’ll see that the WWE is paid rather well for this. While I don’t see them immediately moving Raw and Smackdown to this channel exclusively next year, this network will undoubtedly become a bargaining chip for creative control. If I were running USA or SyFy right now, I’m getting ready to make an attractive counterproposal. That’s the short term. The long-term reality is if you want to watch current WWE, or anything from the tape library, or maybe any wrestling at all, it’s going to be here.

While delivery of content is doubtless an important bullet point for the channel, The WWE Network exists for creative control. For now, we can imagine: one place for every new and old TV show, placed in a moving stream for general and expert fans alike. Maybe I was wrong about WWE.com becoming the new truth of the company. Maybe it’ll be this?

K Sawyer Paul is an author and publisher living in Toronto. He tweets and tumbls. In the wrestling world he is known for This is Sports Entertainment and International Object.

Edited by TH.