Dave Meltzer Discusses Future, Or Lack Thereof, Of WWE Video Archives

WWE's newest media rights deal was recently announced as it was confirmed that all of the company's main roster Premium Live Events will move to the ESPN DTC streaming service in the spring of 2026, while also simulcasting select events on other ESPN platforms. The $1.6 billion deal that will last until 2031 is another step forward for WWE in the direction of getting more eyes on their current product, but that does mean that their past events could fade into obscurity. The new deal will not see WWE's extensive video library move to ESPN, and according to Dave Meltzer on a recent edition of "Wrestling Observer Radio," some of those archives might get lost forever.

"There's a solid chance that the archives will go away in the United States, or there will be a skeleton set of archives somewhere, kind of like around the world Netflix does have a lot, a lot, a lot of the pay-per-views and some old episodes of Raw and things like that. But it's not anywhere close to what the WWE Network had, or even what Peacock had. So those archives are going to be harder and harder [to find]. Some of it, or a lot of it will probably be put on YouTube."

Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select has confirmed Meltzer's last point in that the WWE Vault YouTube channel could be highlighted more prominently as there are reportedly talks of striking a deal with Google and YouTube. The channel has already uploaded a number of WWE's biggest matches and events, as well as some hidden gems that have never been seen before, with companies like WCW and ECW getting their own channels on the site to cover all of the footage WWE owns from them.

Please credit "Wrestling Observer Radio" when using quotes from this article, and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.