Global Wrestling Network

» see globalwrestlingnetwork.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

gwn launched into thirty nine territories and turkey was not one of them. argentina, japan, malta, uruguay, most of europe, and then a gap where i live. that is the honest distance on this grave and it is also the joke in the product's name, since a service calling itself the global wrestling network was actually a licensing map with holes in it.

it went live on 10 october 2017, owned by anthem wrestling exhibitions out of toronto and built on the impact wrestling library. seven ninety nine a month for the premium tier, with a free tier underneath it and thirty days of trial to get you in. over a thousand hours of archive at launch: every pay-per-view except the most recent one, the asylum-years weekly ppvs, british boot camp, a run of impact episodes going back to 2004. it also carried tape from the fight network and border city wrestling, and all twelve volumes of wrestling at the chase, which is st. louis territory footage from decades before anyone streamed anything.

ed nordholm said on wrestling observer radio in september 2017 that the goal was to be an alternative brand to the wwe network. that is a clear statement of the actual problem. the wwe network had launched in february 2014 and had taken most of the wrestling audience's monthly subscription budget with it. that is why every other promotion suddenly needed an app.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

it did not launch cleanly. the service briefly went live on 12 september 2017 while the infrastructure was still being adjusted and was pulled down the next day, which is the kind of thing that happens when a launch date is announced on television before the engineering is finished. the real launch came four weeks later. by november 2017 it was adding independent promotions in volume, wrestlecade and rocky mountain pro and defy and future stars of wrestling, which was the actual pitch: not just one company's archive but a place where small promotions could be found at all.

then the name became a legal problem. gwn was named after global force wrestling, the promotion impact had briefly merged with. in october 2017, the same month the service launched, jeff jarrett left the company and took the gfw rights with him, because he had owned them since 2014. on 14 august 2018 jarrett and global force entertainment sued anthem in the district court of tennessee for copyright infringement. if the suit had landed, impact would have had to suspend gwn entirely. anthem countersued in july 2019, arguing the two brands did not look alike.

~ what it became ~

the lawsuit did not kill it. rebranding did. on 28 april 2019, during the rebellion pay-per-view, impact announced impact plus, and on 1 may gwn stopped being a thing. same library and same company, with the lawsuit's initials scrubbed out of the name. impact plus was later renamed again to tna+ when the company went back to calling itself tna wrestling.

so the service is technically still running under its third name, and the grave here is for a brand that existed for eighteen months and was almost certainly retired because its owner could not keep safely saying the word global. wrestling companies rename things constantly and it usually means nothing. this one meant a lawyer had a point.

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