Tony Khan
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Tony Khan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I had to show him the opportunities there and also demonstrate that I put a business case together for the plan here because we didn't have a TV deal secured at first.
I had interest in the show, but I really had to make the commitment, sign up the wrestlers at the start of 2019 and make a huge investment in this business and the wrestlers, the business plan, the marketing and launching a promotion from scratch, which takes tons of capital before we're going to see the returns that now we're seeing as we build this thing and have become a huge TV promotion.
And now in 2025, also for the first time, a major streaming promotion as our AEW shows stream on Max every week. They're silent cast. And those shows are also live on Max. And we have a whole library of AEW shows people can watch on Max. And when we launched We were a TV promotion and we still are a TV promotion that's on TBS every Wednesday and on TNT every Saturday.
But we have something really special going now where we are simulcasting as well. And it affords us the ability to find new audience, reach new people that might not have been watching on cable or might not be watching cable at all anymore. And what's really great is there is a great audience on cable. And we've been able to sustain that. We've actually had growth.
What's amazing is in Q1, we started simulcasting. And Q1 versus Q4, our cable numbers are up in every demo on both shows. And we're simulcasting on Mac. So we've got new viewers streaming. We're one of the top sports streaming shows on the Mac's platform. So really having a great time. It's also just like the quality of the show. That's the business. I'm a wrestling fan. I love the wrestling.
And as a wrestling producer, our shows have been awesome this year.
A bunch of people did not. And a lot of people in wrestling had heard hundreds of charlatans come through over the years trying to start another wrestling promotion. It was something people had dreamed of. And it was one of those things where people had really lost faith. So it was hard for me to convince people.
It was also like at the start of a movie where you're trying to round everyone up and everyone's saying like, no, I'm not going to sign up.
There was some of that. And there was some people that at first didn't take it seriously. And then when I finally got a few people buying into it, all of a sudden, a lot more people started to take interest in what was to be AEW, this promotion that I was working to launch in 2018 and then announced in 2019. And we launched, did our first shows in 2019. And
We celebrated the five-year anniversary of Wednesday Night Dynamite last year, the six-year anniversary of AEW. Our first show, Double or Nothing, is coming up just weeks from now. And the six-year anniversary of Wednesday Night Dynamite is coming up in October.
Well, so I was in Los Angeles because we had just done a show in Salt Lake City on March 11th of 2020. And it became very apparent on March 11th of 2020 that everything was going to be shutting down. And probably our March 18th show... that we'd been planning to have in the Northeast was probably not going to happen.
We had a series of events in Rochester and Newark, some major events that were canceled and then moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where we did the shows instead. And I did some soul searching. I went to what I would call a dark place to figure out
what people were doing in entertainment, what you would do if you switched off the audience, which is not something I had to think of, and it was a problem-solving exercise. I watched stuff outside of wrestling. I watched some small wrestling studio shows, but they still had a small audience, but they weren't the big arena shows like we had been doing.
I thought that was interesting, and that is a callback to the wrestling I grew up on. As a tape trader, a lot of great Southern wrestling was like that. And then I started to watch what other people in TV did under environmental challenges. I thought there were some great shows David Letterman did during the hurricane.
And it was like, just Dave and the camera guys, they didn't even have the guys in the booth to do the top 10 graphics. So the guys were doing the top 10 list with cue cards in front of Dave's desk. And it was just Dave and Denzel Washington. And I watched that and I was like, okay, I think that worked really well because that was David Letterman and Denzel Washington.
I basically took away, I was like, I was captivated by those two guys and he stripped everything down and he didn't lose anything. And it actually put the focus on David Letterman and Denzel Washington. The problem with that is that only works if you have Denzel Washington. I thought they were fantastic, but I also thought you'd be crazy for anyone else to try what they did.
Then I watched Stephen Colbert in the pandemic, his shows, which were that week. The Letterman shows I were watching were like, you know, at the time, probably eight years old. Now they would be like 13 years old. And the Stephen Colbert shows I thought were very interesting because he was trying to do something similar. And I thought he's a great comedian, but he was trying to tell jokes.
in an empty studio. And I thought it was challenging. And it's interesting because it's like, he's talking to the camera, he's talking to the people at home, but there's nobody to react. And for a comedian, it helps to gear the laughter for the jokes. And I think there's a similarity between wrestling and comedy because there's a lot of subjectivity. There's an art to it.
There is definitely skill. There's people that are far better at the craft than others, even though there's a subjectivity than who's better than, you know, than who's the best.
Yeah, absolutely. And hearing the live crowd, it's a big part of it.
Showing 61–80 of 120 · page 4 of 6
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