Ever since it became public knowledge that Peacock’s agreement to house the WWE archive would (largely) come to an end on December 31st, 2025, it has been pondered what would happen. The “WWE Vault” family of YouTube channels does an admirable job of curating and presenting the overwhelming library but there are some who want easy access to the most premium of moments. Well, Netflix has stepped up to help (as rights allow).
Beginning yesterday, reports began to surface that pages for classic WWE PPVs were partially appearing within the U.S. Netflix interface. Initially, this was easy to be resistant to. After all, Netflix already houses all of the spotted events internationally and there had been no announcement of an agreement that expanded the streamer’s rights. So, it was easy to dismiss at first as a technical glitch. A handful of other placeholders appeared throughout the day and excitement simmered. Then, after midnight the floodgates opened and a sizeable PPV archive was set as live.
So, what’s available? Well, nearly every PPV/PLE ever produced by the company. Fatal 4-Way 2010 is a known exception (and has been since the international archive settled back in March). The most recent PLE currently available in the United States is Wrestlepalooza from September. This puts ESPN’s exclusivity window at a relatively short 90 days. There’s some “poster” image weirdness going on with some pages right now but that’s to be expected as everything settles in.
Just to make this clear, neither the NXT Vault nor Smackdown Vault pages are available in the U.S. This is not an oversight by Netflix and thus not something to blame them for. NXT is tangled up with remaining rights for the PLEs on Peacock until March of this year and NBC tied up the Smackdown rights long term when they brought the show to the USA Network last year.
Netflix are not expected to add any particularly deep cuts to their WWE library. Their strategy is to leverage the heavy hitters, not become a pro wrestling archive. However, WWE’s relatively new YouTube strategy has been more than happy to dig deep, even if the algorithm doesn’t reward bulk uploads.
So, what are your thoughts on this surprise agreement seemingly made between WWE and Netflix? Are you furious at the Peacock archive not transferring over in full or simply relieved that WWE’s PPVs have been kept easily accessible? Let us know below!
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