More Details On Impact Wrestling’s New Deal With The Pursuit Channel

PWInsider has more details on the deal between Impact Wrestling and The Pursuit Channel that was announced earlier today. Impact will debut on the network on Friday, January 11 at 10 PM ET.

Impact sees the move as financially beneficial and the network is said to be happy to have the promotion. Anthem Media owns the Pursuit network, which focuses on men’s outdoors programming like fishing and hunting. However, the network has a smaller audience than POP TV or Destination America. Several major cable providers like Comcast don’t carry it and others like Verizon Fios have it on their paid tier. You can find out if you get the channel here.

It’s unknown how Impact will make the show available to fans who don’t get the channel or if they will release the episodes to Twitch or Youtube as MLW does. Pursuit Channel has a Roku channel called Pursuit Up, but it doesn’t include live programming. With the smaller audience, it will likely be harder for Impact to get advertisers and sponsors.

Impact is pleased with their relationship with Pop TV. Sources said that they went from a barter deal on advertising when they started to getting paid a free by the network (around $1 million a year) on top of splitting ad revenue (another $1-2 million). They added that the network went “out of their way” to work with Impact. POP TV is expected to be rebranding in 2019 and Impact didn’t fit into those plans.

The debut episode on Pursuit will include material taped on January 7 at the Nashville Fairgrounds Arena, just after the Homecoming PPV. This is the company’s third new channel after leaving SpikeTV in 2014. Pursuit, which started in 2008 as a DirecTV exclusive channel, said in June that they had seven million unique viewers in March 2018.