WWE programming is about to get a lot more interactive for early adopters of virtual reality hardware, with the sports entertainment company creating a new virtual reality channel on the Samsung MILK VR device that allows viewers to watch the action in 360-degrees.
While the WWE has made its RAW pre-show available to watch in virtual reality since July, this is the first VR-dedicated channel that the company has unveiled, with WWE 360 having launched on the Samsung MILK last week. The channel currently contains highlights of the company’s SummerSlam PPV, which includes a main event between Brock Lesnar and The Undertaker along with a championship match against then-champion Seth Rollins and John Cena. There is also footage of the company’s NXT TakeOver event included on the channel.
Samsung and WWE’s partnership will hopefully lead to a variety of virtual reality programming, with the entertainment company being one of the largest to begin implementing the new technology into their broadcasts. If full shows become available on WWE 360, wrestling fans could seen see themselves being given virtual ringside seats during an episode of RAW, an experience which Samsung hopes will help to sell the MILK to many prospective consumers.
Michelle Wilson, WWE’s chief revenue and marketing officer, spoke of the possibility of streaming events to the VR channel, saying: “We’d be very interested in experimenting with livestreaming an event. If you can give a ringside view, even if it’s from a 180-degree perspective, there’s a lot of interest in that from a live perspective. We have a WWE Network that’s a direct-to-consumer streaming service and we do live pay-per-views every month.”
Though livestreaming VR content presents another challenge, Wilson stated that the company had already made the “first step” by implementing the channel into its broad repertoire of revolutionary ventures, which has also included the streaming platform WWE Network. The Network, which boasts 1.3 million paying subscribers, grants users access to a massive selection of content including original, WWE-produced shows, old episodes of WWE, WCW and ECW, along with livestreaming access to the latest PPVs.
If WWE could implement WWE 360 into its WWE Network service in the future by giving viewers the change to watch PPVs in virtual reality (it’s unlikely they’d be able to do so with the likes of RAW, given that they’re tied into contracts with broadcasters), this could be a bold new step for both the company and the technology.
