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Originally Posted by Observer
A lot of the talk is regarding Destination America. It's been described that TNA has become the tail (DA) wagging the dog, and the people from the network, unlike with Spike, have no clue about wrestling. As noted they've put pressure on regarding who they want pushed, which is all cosmetic, or fame. The other frustration is that the people at the station seem to change their minds weekly when it comes to TV. While Impact hasn't been moved, there is a lot of questioning moving from Wednesday to Friday, which DA appeared to do because with Smackdown moving from Friday, they thought they would get the wrestling fans used to watching on that night. They were originally doing tons of replays and shoulder programming and now all the shoulder programming has been dropped and they are only airing TNA wrestling on Friday nights from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., with two airings of Impact and one airing of Unlocked at 1 a.m. Unlocked has now been moved from Saturday at 10 a.m. to Friday at 7 p.m. to Thursday at 1 a.m. (It was moved from Friday night to Thursday night last week with nobody even knowing, and then it never aired on Thursday due to a last minute change by the station) to Friday at 1 a.m. In addition TNA Greatest Matches show that aired on Saturdays has been dropped. They are apparently now all about just the Friday night first-show rating, although they are doing the automatic replay with the idea it gets the West Coast viewers. The feeling looks to be that all the other programming was hurting the Friday rating. If you remember when the deal was signed, Dixie Carter was pushing it as a station that would give them far more air time and more than just the two hour show every week. Now Carter is trying to push the idea that they will start creating more Internet content. The problem never was that they didn't have enough content, though.
The honeymoon is very much over. The Discovery channel signed TNA as an experiment and I was told that the experiment turned out very bad when it comes to generating ad revenue (and you can watch the shows and see the ads) and they expected far more viewers. Impact is, by far, the highest rated show in the history of the station, which on would think would be a huge positive for the company's standing. I guess they were expecting a far larger percentage of the loyal Spike audience to come with them. Destination America right now is in 61.7% of the homes Spike was in, but they are doing (in February as compared to February one year ago) 30.2% of the viewership for the first run show and even throwing in the first replay, you're getting less than half. But the channel has a ton to do with it when you go from a fairly strong channel (Spike) to a channel with maybe 15% of the viewership. UFC has never done close to Spike numbers on FS 1 even though FS 1 was in maybe 88% of the homes Spike was. It's just the nature of TV viewing. I think there was the feeling that wrestling is popular on TV, there were tons of fans used to watching wrestling on Friday nights and TNA's fan base as far as TV viewing was thought to be extremely loyal.
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Pretty much looking at another ECW-TNN type situation. TNN was responsible for a lot of stuff that helped contribute to ECW's demise happening a lot soon than it should have.
Lucha Underground also looking at a lot of negative stuff in the near future. Talks between them and JR broke down, going to lose a lot of steam because of the long delay between seasons, could be looking at some bad financial problems soon, and plans for non-tv touring likely being dropped. Viewership also being nowhere what they want or expected in the US (mostly due to Hispanics and tv wrestling fans being more WWE only viewers).