International Object

​International Object (IO) is a blog about theatre, combat, and politics. International relations, human rights, choreography, and steel chairs to the head.

WWE Greatest Matches: First Impressions

This is a set of notes I’ve made after a few hours into a WWE Greatest Matches monthly subscription. I wanted to do this last month, but the site only became stable recently. 

  • It’s in flash, which sucks. There’s simply no way around that. The FAQ (which is always available right below the video, in full) suggests a forthcoming iOS app, which tells me they’re moving their codecs to H.264, which is vastly superior. So there’s hope.

  • Setup is a little confusing. The forms are all in flash too, and typing at any sort of speed causes errors. If you have auto-fill for your information, it won’t work here.

  • Speaking of the FAQ, it’s the first thing that loads, and the only thing that persists. It’s like WWE really wants you to understand what you’re getting into. They don’t answer the important questions, though.

  • It’s not at all apparent how to sign up for the monthly or yearly rate. I had to wait for the ad card to flip by to find a button. What’s much easier to find are buttons to buy individual matches and episodes.

  • I’ve got a 10mbps internet plan, which isn’t the fastest. Still, video not only started almost right away, but after a few moments automatically upscales in quality. When it upscales, the quality is, I believe, as good as the footage will allow. Older stuff looks bad. New stuff looks great.

  • It appears every single video starts with a poor quality feed, then upscales after a few seconds, which tells me they re-jig your connection speed with every video instead of just saving your settings.

  • You can’t “fast forward” but you can jump around in the video, using the Youtube-like bar that pops-up. Typical with flash, if you jump around too much it’ll crash. That goes for the whole site, actually.

  • There is no way to bookmark anything. If you stop a video, you can start again in the same spot. But start a new video and return to a previous one, and it’ll start over from the beginning.

  • To add to the web standards frustration, there are no unique URLs. Clicking back in your browser takes you out of the site entirely. Everything is done in a frame, which reeks of amateur hour.

  • Expect to see the “Unknown Error” dialogue box a lot.

  • The last point is doubly confusing, as WWE.com has a “recently viewed”, “recommended”, and “favourites” in the footer. But the only things that show up there are videos on WWE.com, not the paid subscription site.

  • I want to make this clear: this is the best deal WWE has ever offered. Just read the schedule. WWE Classics on Demand offers about a quarter of that, and costs twice as much.

  • The idea of the site is that, for $4.95 a month, you can see everything on the program, and everything in the general archive. Really love a match or show? Buy it and keep it forever.

  • It looks like all the matches from the month’s listings can be played, but every video they have is available. Older ones, for $1.99 a pop. There’s a giant red button that either says “play” or “purchase”, and you can’t accidentally buy something. It’s a two-click system.

  • Forever is still a point of contention. There doesn’t seem to be any way to own the content. You can’t download it. If they were to shutter the site one day, presumably, all your purchases would flush.

  • It’s also not clear when a match downgrades from playable to something you have to purchase, but the information is in the schedule PDF (the only thing from the site they let you download). It looks like videos are available for 3-4 months. That’s pretty generous. 

  • I was utterly shocked to see that Jericho VS Guerrera from Superbrawl VIII isn’t available, as it’s part of every WWE DVD ever released.

  • You could lose a week just browsing through stuff. The selection is just massive, and organized in all the ways I like: by show, by era, by company, by year and by superstar.

  • Browsing by superstar is amazing. Bam Bam Bigelow’s two matches on offer? Vs Windham at Starrcade 88, and Vs Tazz at Living Dangerously 98. Click the “people” tab, and you get links to both Tazz’s and Bigelow’s libraries. Spectacular.

  • Having said that, there’s one match in here under Diesel, and three under Kevin Nash. Come on.

  • The related search isn’t just about matches. If there’s a match or show in the library where a superstar is involved, it’s in their ‘related’ section. This is especially useful for special guest referee matches and manager roles, like Bobby Heenan.

  • One giant detail: This is where you buy new PPVs if you want to watch them (legally) on your computer. Night of Champions clocks in at $44.95. There’s a bit of great subversion in the text underneath the price. Instead of ‘buy’ it says, ‘select this plan.’ Really makes you think. Five bucks more gets you an entire years’ subscription to the site.

  • Capitol Punishment is also available for $44.95, even though you can buy it in the iTunes store (in HD) for $17.99. Ridiculous.

  • I’m going to need an entire other article disputing some of these so-called “100 Greatest Matches”. The 97 Royal Rumble match is on here, along with Sting Vs Hogan at Starrcade 97.

  • Final note: This is a great upgrade from their old model, but there’s so much I want to do with it that I can’t. I want to build playlists that will automatically move from one match to the next. I want to share videos in a way that’s not built from a shitty Wordpress plugin from 2001. Most importantly, I want to watch this stuff on my iPad. WWE doesn’t even need to put it on TV. Just make it available for the iPad, and I’ll buy an Apple TV to stream it. Let’s call that the fabled WWE channel and call it a day.