I wouldn't say they deserve to fold, that's harsh on the employees, but in the circumstances of not having a new network, the Carter family need to sell up because they quite blatantly aren't acting in the best interests of the company.

If the Russo thing is true, can the family truly believe he is worth more than national television exposure?

I only mean they deserve to fold if they've made the monumentally stupid decision to leave Spike of their own accord. In the current 'landscape' of wrestling in the states, they really do need to do whatever is necessary to keep themselves on television and in business.

As far as Russo goes, the word seems to be that Dixie wasn't exactly forthcoming with Spike when asked if he was still working with the company. But then, as you say, is he really worth basically the whole future of the company ?. Would they really stake a multitude of people's jobs on the future of one man ?

Well spike was helping with big contracts for tna, angle looks like hes leaving in september and spike cancel impact..

Tna should look to netflix or partner with a global social media brand.

At this moment i give tna 1 year left to survive, damm you hogan, easy e and russo.

You know what, Netflix isn't such a bad idea ..

I don't think it'll take as long as a year if they can't secure a new TV deal by October though. But then that said, if they go back to how they started and move Impact back to PPV only, maybe the revenue from that and from the international markets might just be enough ?

I can't see that the revenue from PPV only would be enough to sustain TNA.
But they have a lot of support outside of the US. Would it be possible to keep such an organisation running on overseas sales? Could they do a series of overseas tours and film loads of episodes that way? For example, a weeks tour of the UK generates a couple of months worth of TV programmes. I wonder how costly or cost effective it is to do this? There certainly seems to be excellent support from the fans when they hit the UK. What about other countries?

I didn't say just that .. but then you go on to agree with me anyway .. heh


I suppose you'd have to factor in travelling costs, production costs, staff wages as well as arena costs here and, potentially, having to pay for any permits needed to film television shows as well.

I think you also have to factor in the fact that a lot of the talent might not necessarily be away from their families in other countries for weeks and months on end. Making TNA essentially a "global" promotion would mean a lot of international travel and some of them might simply not want to do it.

Wow. This is big (and somewhat unexpected) news. I always expected that Spike would renew them but looking back at the last year or so, it did really look like writing on the wall time.

I don't see how they could take the company back to weekly PPVs if they couldn't get people to buy the monthly ones.

TNA needs a rebrand IF they get a new TV deal, start a fresh. They need to either completely forget or fully implement IMPACT Wrestling as a brand, be TNA Wrestling or IMPACT Wrestling. The company is called TNA yet there is very little mention of this on their website, the url is even impactwrestling.com. If they want to be known as IMPACT, drop the TNA name completely. If they want to be known as TNA, at least have their website and show logo including TNA somewhere.

It could work as long as they didn't charge something extortionate for it. If they charged a smaller, nominal amount then the existing fanbase may well be inclined to tune in - especially if they could sort out some kind of live streaming with YouTube.

They could go down the WWE "Network" route to an extent. Launch a subscription based Youtube channel that gives you all the Impacts and the PPV's for a monthly fee.

If the million people who regularly tune in to Impact each week paid for that then it might work.

But then they may well have another deal lined up I suppose - I hope so. I think wrestling will get very stale very quickly in the states if the WWE is the only national option.

Oof. Unexpected, and probably a fatal blow.

Just as the shows were improving, too. I'll level with you: I have no interest in a 100% WWE wrestling diet. It's just too corporate, slow moving and sanitised. Movesets are watered down too much, the company spends all its time trying to force certain performers down our throats, whilst needlessly marginalising others. Impact has its faults, but it's been fantastic fun the last two weeks. Nobody can claim TNA haven't done everything they could at the New York tapings to try and stay in business.

How long until the next company to challenge Vince? Will there even be one? This is a complete disaster for wrestling, in my opinion.

I doubt weekly PPV is really feasible. Especially because they would lack the TV exposure to grow their fanbase or make up for troughs in subscription rates. The Youtube thing would make more sense if it wouldn't be on TV around the world. People would rather get a stream of Challenge than pay for a Youtube video I would think. And how austere would the company have to be to survive on Youtube? If you thought the cuts of the last year were deep, they would pale in comparison to this.

I think they need a TV deal to survive, even if it means being on a lesser network and having to cut more costs. Interesting to see what happens with Jarrett now.

I think if it ever happens, it will be a long time before a company challenges WWE. If a company wants to compete with the global WWE machine, it's going to take more than Carter money, it's doubtful it could be done with McMahon amount of money.

The ultimate issue, even if they don't have a US deal in place, they do have international deals to honour so they will still have to present international broadcasters with a TV show each week.

I think it's stupid for anyone to try to compete with Vince because he's so well established and the top. TNA were stupid enough to rush into supposed competition and blew a ton of money on Hogan and Eric. They were going well and forming their own identity with AJ as champ at the back end of 2009 and they pissed it all away rather than consolidating that position.

2010 going live, on the road, into WWE's established timeslot did nothing for TNA except to make them look minor league when they had to revert back to taped in Florida on Thursday nights.

They are trying now but two weeks of good shows doesn't make people who have turned off come back unfortunately. But then 2010 comes down to Bischoff's ego thinking they could battle Vince again and as always, it wasn't his money he spunked up the wall..

If Jarrett is smart he'd use as little TNA talent as possible and really try to differentiate, bar one or two exceptions.

The sad thing is that have good talent, but failed so badly creatively that it really devalued some of their wrestlers.

It seems to me that Jarrett is almost running a 2014 National Wrestling Alliance model, partnering up with existing global territories. Finance wise, using existing infrastructure then adding to it, it seems a very shrewd move...learning from TNA's mistakes.

Sadly, without TV distribution in the US, TNA is all but done. The only hope here is that there's another deal in place...or one is secured soon.

Going back to the PPV model would be a disaster. Even at 9.99 per week you're still valuing this company 4x more than the WWE Network. It would not work.

They got 2 months, either they find a new home in the US (and even then they wouldn't get the same money Spike was giving them so they'd need to cut down even more) or they're done in October.

Angle wouldn't pass a medical (And it is rumoured Vince doesn't want him working for WWE) & Bully Ray is apparently considered more trouble than he's worth. (Daffney got a big lawsuit settlement because of an "unsafe working environment" that was effectively Bullys fault, remember)

I thought something was up when they taped despite it being unlikely Spike would be happy about it.

Amazing that if they last till November they existed for longer than WCW did- 12.5 years- a longer run than many expected.

Anyway- Leave the memories alone!

Both sides would have escape clauses in those tv contracts. If Impact is cancelled in the USA, there is no more show.

I think Jarrett should focus on using experienced names with short term runs and swapping them in and out to keep things fresh while building the show around newer people. I thought that was the way that TNA was going to go with the quick runs for Rhino, Dreamer and Matt Hardy with Tajiri booked for the next tapings too. Jeff could do that with people like Roode, Storm, Anderson etc.

To correct you a little Hollie, I don't think TNA went on the road when they went to the Raw time slot. That didn't come until 2011. Going on the road was the right move creatively and aesthetically but it didn't add up financially. TNA had so much potential but the booking and business sense was often so poor that it sometimes seems a surprise that they made it this long.

Oooooops I thought they did all three from 2010 when they went onto Monday nights. I'm a massive supporter of getting TNA out of Florida but they really needed to asses the finances of doing so which is what they didn't do and led them back to Universal Studios.

Some of the business decisions are misguided at best, negligent at worst. Too many people making too many decisions and I believe, just a personal opinion, Bischoff and Hogan did nothing for TNA. They were the biggest influences in Dixie's ear which saw the TNA brand turned into what it is now and the move to Monday nights. The company were barely pulling Smackdown figures IIRC, what on earth (other than ego) led Bischoff to think they could compete on Raw scale in Raw's timeslot?

The destruction of the X Division, heel faction after heel faction after heel faction trying to run the show, Hogan and Bischoff front and centre, Sting vs Jeff Hardy in that god awful segment people call a match, Jarrett not being the first inductee into their pretty worthless Hall Of Fame, taping PPV's literally seven or eight months before they aired, letting people like AJ walk out, advertising events in baseball stadiums which 300 people turn up to. So many piss poor creative decisions let alone business ones from a family that own and run a global company.

If TNA do fold, it will be sad. But in a way for me, it will be sad because they had so much potential and for whatever reason, the Carter family failed to capitalise on that and the blame will land at Dixie's feet.

When you see a lot of commercials during Impact for farmersonly.com (not kidding) you're in trouble.

You guys already know how I feel about this, but I'll put my point of view forward one final time:

TNA aren't going out of business because of decisions they made in the past. They're going out of business because their network is cancelling them, it's as simple as that.

I strongly disagree that you can blame the demise of TNA on Hogan and Bischoff. Sure they were a waste of money, but those losses were absorbed by the Carters. Moving to Monday caused a temporary drop in ratings, but then those ratings recovered. Neither of these things did lasting damage.

I also disagree that you can blame it on booking. Time and again we've seen that good booking has a very minor effect on ratings; arguably none at all. Whatever some on the internet say, there have been some very good runs of Impact. Still they hit that 1.4 million viewer ceiling.

What's killed TNA is that it proved impossible to draw enough viewers to a non-WWE wrestling product to justify the expense of making it. I'm pretty sure that's what Spike will be telling Dixie. They've tried literally everything. The fact is that the market simply isn't there.

You're of course entitled to disagree. I'm not going to argue that there aren't things TNA could have done differently. But different enough to actually be a profitable, mainstream, truly nationwide and successful #2 wrestling promotion? I'll believe it when one of those exists. I'm not holding my breath (although I'd like to be wrong! )

This makes sense but I do think that there was an opportunity in 2005 and again in 2009 to grow their audience by establishing a unique identity around the likes of Styles, Joe, Daniels and later Wolfe. The stupid decisions really killed off these opportunities and tarnished the brand image for many fans and potentially in the eyes of the network. For the amount of talent that they have had on their books, I feel like they could have done a lot more.

I didn't say that the reason for them being cancelled is due to past business and creative decisions, I'm just pointing out that there has been very bad management of TNA as a brand, business and creative wise.

I also didn't blame Hogan and Bischoff for the demise of TNA (if that even happens), I said they did nothing to improve TNA and a lot of the bad decisions under their employment were products of them.

TNA as TNA worked, and it worked bloody well. TNA as a poorly produced WWE brand hasn't. They need to look for a new TV deal, and then Dixie needs to step down, wake up and realise what she is doing or they need to sell up. TNA, whatever brand they want to use, is tarnished and if they can stick around, they have to work bloody hard.