NO! NO! NO! FALSE ALARM!

[MvP]

lol I just randomly clicked on this thread and I see that I'm fighting in Japan.

[Golden Taters]

MVP...and it wouldn't even be a fair fight.

I gotta go with Rush. He is the size of an elephant and has the heart of a lion.

[Warner2BruceTD]

* 21,615 people in Japan watched New Japan’s first ever iPPV according to forum regular enuhito, which is a huge success for a first time attempt. New Japan does have hopes to make these iPPVs international eventually and if/when that occurs I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

WrestleMania did 9,000 iPPV buys worldwide.

Keep in mind, this was basically a New Japan house show (albeit a big house show, since it was G1 and had a great double main event), and really the only way to see it was iPPV. Obviously, most people who wanted to see WrestleMania were able to see it on traditional PPV, and the show did about 1.1-1.3 million buys worldwide. So the comparison isn't apples to apples by any stretch. I'm curious to see what kind of business one of these NJPW iPPV's can do in Japan while also airing on PPV. PPV is a niche deal in Japan, only available to upper middle class & wealthy people with pricey satellite packages. So I think it would do similar numbers to what this show did.

Internationally, I think they would be looking at several thousand, between Europe, US, Canada, and Mexico. I think something like WrestleKingdom would do even more. The ability to not be forced to watch live is the key.

This same service that hosted the iPPV hosted several live (and free) All Japan shows earlier this year. They were available internationally. The only thing stopping New Japan from offering this up to us is whoever is in charge of the decision. I think it's inevitable.

[Warner2BruceTD]

New Japan did a two show tour in New Jersey in 2011. They brought all of the stars (including Tanahashi), and were co-promoted by Jersey All Pro, a strong local indie that has been around for a decade and knows what they are doing in terms of promoting in the area. They ran the usual Jersey All Pro building in Rahway, New Jersey.

The shows drew what was described to me as "decent peak ROH sized" crowds. So we are talking around 500-600. Clearly nobody flew in (fwiw, I didn't, even though I have family in the area to stay with), and they drew the usual east coast hardcores who go to all of the ROH/EVOLVE/JAP/CZW/etc etc shows.

Notable is that to my knowledge, Jersey All Pro has not run a show since, so clearly "Fat Frank" lost his ass flying over the entire New Japan crew while drawing probably doing under 1,000 for two shows combined.

My point here, is if New Japan can draw ROH sized crowds in an ROH market, and ROH does about 2000 iPPV buys for their shows (pre iPPV disasters, I dont think they do those numbers anymore due to all of the issues), then you would think that New Japan could do in that 1500-2000 ballpark for an iPPV in the U.S. I have no idea if live gate correlates to iPPV at all, but I can say that DGUSA & EVOLVE (especially EVOLVE) draw smaller houses than ROH for house shows, and also draw less than ROH on iPPV (last I heard, they do just under 1,000 for DGUSA shows, in the 700-900 range, and probably way less for EVOLVE). So maybe there is something to it.

If New Japan can do up to 2000 buys in the U.S., plus another couple of thousand from Europe, Mexico, etc, I don't see why they wouldn't do it since making the stream available would not require any if at all additional costs.