Eric Bischoff Believes ROH Was A Good Deal For AEW

AEW President Tony Khan in a major announcement last week, revealing that All Elite Wrestling has purchased the Ring of Honor promotion. Former WCW President Eric Bischoff believes the purchase made perfect sense for the company.

Speaking on the latest episode of the 83 Weeks Podcast, Bischoff explained why it made more sense for Khan to purchase ROH instead of Vince McMahon. WWE reportedly had talks to purchase ROH after it went on a hiatus in November.

“You could argue that because of the power of Peacock and that platform that any additional content might be a good strategic move for them, but it makes more sense for Tony [Khan],” Bischoff said. “Given his roster, I would agree with that absolutely. If it made sense to anybody, it made sense to Tony Khan.”

Eric went ahead to talk about the signing and explained why he thinks it is a good move for AEW, especially the video library and potential streaming deal. However, the WWE Hall of Famer was critical of ROH and called it a short-term purchase.

“In the end of it, all the conversation about was it a good deal for Tony or not, I think it was a good deal,” Bischoff said. “If Tony’s goal ultimately is to build, independent of Turner, is to build his own streaming platform? Absolutely the acquisition of Ring of Honor makes sense. It’s not going to make financial sense in the short term, it’s just not. How many people around in the United States television viewing audience, how many of them even know what Ring of Honor is.”

“Short term, it is not going to be profitable but three years from now, five years from now, seven, 10 years out… Because streaming platforms are popping up every day. That’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger and guess what? Content becomes more and more valuable over time. Content that probably wasn’t worth anything five years ago conceivably is not worth quite a bit of money because the market has grown and the ability to feed it with content has not.”

“My opinion, short term that library is going to mean absolutely nothing and in a lot of cases it looks like s–t. You couldn’t do anything with it anyway, it looks like it was built on a phone in a high school gym. But there’s still some great content there.”

Tony Khan took up the opportunity to speak a little more on his recent purchase in a Post Show Media Scrum after AEW Revolution. He talked about his relationship with Sinclair Broadcasting and how they were excited to work with him.

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