More Details On WWE Network's Move To Peacock Emerge

WWE have confirmed that Peacock will commence with the roll-out of WWE Network content from Thursday 18 March 2021. 

Announcing the date in a press release, WWE also confirmed that the WWE Network app will be terminated in the United States on Sunday 4 April, with users required to manually sign up for an account with Peacock to continue watching the WWE Network. It has originally been insinuated that accounts would automatically migrate over, but that appears to not be the case. 

It also seems fans will not be able to access some of WWE's extensive backlog of content that has been available on the Network in recent years. The press release says that Peacock will have the entire WWE Network library of content available by this year's SummerSlam, which is scheduled for Sunday 22 August. This suggests that at least some of the content currently available on the WWE Network will not be available on Peacock until August. 

Rather than migrating the existing WWE Network platform across to Peacock, it seems NBCUniversal will instead be manually uploading the thousands of hours of old shows to their streaming service. Naturally, this will take an enormous effort from the company. 

The Verge is also reporting that the search function within the WWE Network on Peacock is going to be much more limited than it has been in the standalone app, with users initially unable to look for specific matches or individual wrestlers. 

Furthermore, the new platform will not utilise individual match markers on lengthy pay-per-views like the current WWE Network does, meaning viewers will need to fast-forward through the respective show to find the match they were looking for. Peacock claim they are working on adding a visual scrub bar preview to help make that process easier.