WWE Offers New TV Experience Amid Falling Ratings

Forced to tape its weekly shows without a live audience for five months, WWE has found a new home for its broadcasts in order to give fans a unique viewing experience.

The Amway Center in Orlando, Florida, will host “Monday Night Raw,” “Friday Night SmackDown” and WWE pay-per-view events for the foreseeable future. The wrestling promotion is referring to the venue as WWE ThunderDome, which will include “a state-of-the-art set, video boards, pyrotechnics, lasers, cutting-edge graphics and drone cameras.”

“WWE has a long history of producing the greatest live spectacles in sports and entertainment, yet nothing compares to what we are creating with WWE ThunderDome,” said Kevin Dunn, WWE Executive Vice President of Television Production. “This structure will enable us to deliver an immersive atmosphere and generate more excitement amongst the millions of fans watching our programming around the world.”

WWE Thunderdome makes its debut Friday night, just two days before SummerSlam, one of the company’s top PPV events each year.

In mid-March, the company began taping all of its shows at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, “Monday Night Raw” and “SmackDown” were filmed live without an audience for the first time.

WWE eventually introduced several wrestlers ringside to mimic a group of fans, but actual fans watching at home have not responded positively to a viewing experience that didn’t feature crowds in a much smaller venue. Averaging 2.3 million viewers the last time paying customers watched “Monday Night Raw” live, the show’s viewership has steadily declined to about 1.7 million viewers per episode, according to Showbuzz Daily.

Shows at the Amway Center will feature virtual fans, which both the NBA and MLB have used during various broadcasts.

“Like the NBA, we’re doing virtual fans, but we’re also creating an arena-type atmosphere,” Dunn told Sports Illustrated. “We won’t have a flat board, we’ll have rows and rows and rows of fans. We’ll have almost 1,000 LED boards, and it will recreate the arena experience you’re used to seeing with WWE. The atmosphere will be night and day from the Performance Center. This is going to let us have a WrestleMania-level production value, and that’s what our audience expects from us. We are also going to put arena audio into the broadcast, similar to baseball, but our audio will be mixed with the virtual fans. So when fans start chants, we’ll hear them.”

Amway Center will make about $450,000 off WWE’s residency, which is set to last for at least 60 days, Jon Alba and Jeff Allen of Spectrum News 13 report.