The reaction was overwhelmingly negative to having commercial breaks during NXT on USA. Although the arena only held around 400 people, those 400 people have been coming to NXT for years. The crowd was much hotter for the first hour because it was live on television, but they were sour over how slow the matches had gotten when they weren’t recording. The crowd simmered down during the second hour because they knew it had switched over to the Network.
WWE has their matches laid out so that the wrestlers slow way down during commercial breaks as to not give away big moments when the cameras are off. A lot of these breaks consist of chinlocks and other moves meant to purposely delay the match and calm the audience down. The differences in the matches was said to be very noticeable in person compared to when NXT aired exclusively on the WWE Network without commercials.
There’s rumors that the wrestlers were very down on the concept as well. The first hour, which aired on the USA Network, was the first time NXT had commercial breaks so several wrestlers were not used to being forced to slow down in the middle of their matches.
As of this report, there’s still no official word on why the WWE Network crashed when NXT switched to their platform. It’s being speculated that too many people tuned in at the same time and the website couldn’t handle it. The difference between NXT and a normal PPV is that we had to start the stream at a specific time whereas for a PPV we can tune in at any point before or after the start time.
During a media call, Triple H referred to the site crashing as “little glitches” and that the issue was quickly resolved. He claims that the issue was overblown because bad news spreads fast. For what it’s worth, I contacted several of my friends and family during the issue and most of them weren’t able to log into their accounts until well after the show was over.
(credit: f4wonline.com, wwenetwork.com)
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