WWE News: Positive viewership figures for the premiere of the Mixed Match Challenge
What's the story?
Tuesday saw WWE broadcast the Mixed Match Challenge after SmackDown Live. The show was not available outside the United States and the premiere aired on the Facebook Watch platform.
Also Read: Mixed Match Challenge Results: Finn Balor and Sasha Banks vs. Shinsuke Nakamura and Natalya
Despite the restricted viewership, the Mixed Match Challenge view counter on Facebook shows 592,000 views for the new innovative content.
In case you didn't know...
The Mixed Match Challenge is to be a series of 12 episodes broadcast for twenty minutes after SmackDown Live on Facebook Watch. In the tournament, twelve intergender teams will face each other in a mixed tag style competition over 12 weeks.
The victorious team will be given $100,000 for a charity of their choosing. WWE will also donate $10,000 to the losing teams.
One of the final four teams is to be decided by fan vote, making the competition interactive in nature. The show will be made available on the Network two days after it airs on Facebook Live.
Here are the brackets and teams for the competition:
The heart of the matter
The first episode of the Mixed Match Challenge saw Sasha Banks and Finn Balor face Natalya and Shinsuke Nakamura, with the team of Balor and Banks winning.
The show was hosted by Renee Young and Byron Saxton, while Michael Cole, Corey Graves, and Beth Phoenix were on commentary. There are eleven more twenty-minute episodes of the show remaining, and while there were complaints from fans outside the United States due to the restricted content, the Mixed Match Challenge still notched up 592,000 views as of 10:40 GMT. The show peaked at 135,600 viewers at any one point in time during the broadcast.
Watch some clips from tonight's show below:
What's next?
Next week's Mixed Match Challenge will see the team of Miz and Asuka face Big E and Carmella.
Author's take
The Mixed Match Challenge is popular and is different from the usual WWE content. The restricted nature of the content has seen fans complain but the number of views shows that in the United States alone, over half a million viewers tuned in to see the premiere of the competition.