Posted in: Sports, TV, USA Network, WWE | Tagged: Smackdown, USA Network, wwe

WWE SmackDown Going 3 Hours on USA Network Beginning January 3rd

Based on the WWE's website, USA Network will be running WWE SmackDown for three hours on Friday nights beginning on January 3rd.

With all the attention over the past few weeks on WWE Raw's move to Netflix beginning on January 6th, another programming change was quietly confirmed. When the new year rolls around, USA Network may not have WWE Raw, but it will have WWE SmackDown—and the network is officially confirmed to be going three hours with it when January 3rd hits.

Here's a look at a screencap of what was listed on the WWE's website, noting that SmackDown would go to three hours beginning with the January 3rd show from Phoenix, Arizona:

Taking part the panel discussion held earlier this month at Netflix's HQ in Los Angeles to discuss the move to Netflix in January 2025 were Netflix's Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria; VP of Nonfiction Series and Sports Brandon Riegg; WWE President Nick Khan, and WWE Chief Content Officer Paul "Triple H" Levesque (with Michael Cole moderating). The long-term deal sees Netflix streaming "Raw" in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Latin America and the right to stream WWE specials and shows (WrestleMania, Summer Slam, SmackDown, and others) outside of the United States. Here are some of the highlights:

"WWE Raw" Remaining "Family-Friendly, Multi-Generational, Advertiser-Friendly Programming – Khan: "We're not changing the rating of our programming. So there's some online chatter about, 'Oh, it's going to be R-rated, or for us old folks, X-rated.' That's definitely not happening. It's family-friendly, multi-generational, advertiser-friendly programming. It's going to stay that way. I would look for more global flair, especially as the relationship continues to develop. Countries outside of the United States are as important to us as the United States is. So we have certain targeted countries that are priorities for Netflix. They're priorities for us. You're going to see more of that. I think that's the way you'll see a bit of a difference."

Bajaria on "WWE Raw" Not Suffering From "Tyson/Paul" Problems: "Whenever we do live events, we want it to go smoothly for every single one of our members. That's really important—also, to put it in perspective, it was 65 million concurrent streams, right? It was a very successful night. A lot of people [watched], the scale was very big, which is great. There's a lot of interest in it. We expected a big number, for sure. It was a big number. But again, you don't know, and you can't learn these things until you do them, so you take a big swing. Our teams and our engineers are amazing, moved super quickly, and stabilized it, and many of the members had it back up and running pretty quickly. But we learn from those things. And we've all obviously done a lot of stuff to learn and get ready for the NFL and Beyonce at halftime and so we're totally ready and excited for WWE."

Khan on Netflix Becoming Streaming Home Post-Peacock in 2026: "Peacock is our incumbent partner, and we're always going to respect our incumbent's rights in the relationship we have there. So we'll have those conversations with them in 2025, and we'll see what shakes up."

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