Why WWE Didn’t Air The Entire Starrcade Live

WWE brought Starrcade back for the second year in a row, only this year they departed out of the Carolinas and tried their hand at a packed Cincinnati house instead. The show was said to be a fun time for fans in the house, and if you’d like full spoilers you can check that out here.
However, we’re not going to be getting the entire show on the WWE Network. Instead, fans at home will only get a one-hour special chopped down and missing some of the best moments like Seth Rollins vs Dean Ambrose and Bray Wyatt’s return.
If you were one of the lucky fans in the house for Starrcade, then you got to see the show live. But the rest of us have to wait. If you’re wondering why this was the case and WWE didn’t air Starrcade live, Bryan Alvarez had a possible explanation during Wrestling Observer Live.

“Well, it’s not even ‘why didn’t they air it live’ the other thing is ‘why didn’t they just air the whole thing today?’ It is more expensive to run live than it is to tape it and throw it on the network so they very easily could have run the show last night, taped it, threw it up on the Network today, it couldn’t have cost too much money.”
“The only reason I can figure why they only showed four of the matches and not everything else on the show is that it’s a house show and a lot of times they use hose shows as practice for the main roster shows.”

This makes perfect sense, especially if you’ve ever been to a live event and then noticed a spot they did during the show end up on a pay-per-view later on. But it’s a pretty easy explanation. Other than that, there were certainly enough fans who would have wanted to see the whole event.
Only time will tell how WWE will end up running live events on the WWE Network when they start their tiered system later on presumably next year. But it seems like Starrcade was a pretty good trial run for that concept and might give us an idea that although we’ll be getting some action we won’t get the whole show.
If you use our quotes credit Ringside News