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Impact Wrestling's new TV deal with Pursuit HD is not an exclusive deal, PWInsider.com has exclusively (pun intended) learned. The Pursuit move is being seen as a way for Impact to take a breather and not have to worry about where the show will air as they still try to pursue a larger scale deal. If that's the case (and I have no reason to believe it's not), I can't see any way the move to Pursuit was a financial step forward. I'm no accountant but I just can't see how this will bring Impact more money than they were getting at Pop.
With Anthem owning interest in Pursuit, it was, obviously an easy move for the series to make and should Impact find a more beneficial network, home, they would have the ability to shift the series elsewhere. If that happens (and of course, it's a big if), we are told Pursuit has already shown interest in carrying other Impact programming, including potentially Xplosion or a Best of series. We have also been told the network is happy to have Impact, feeling that their audience demographic would also want to watch pro wrestling, but all that said, the network hasn't once promoted Impact is coming on their social media, yet.
While Impact could have remained on Pop going into 2019, another reason Impact wanted to move the series as soon as possible was that the company realized that as Pop continues to rebrand themselves and shift programming around, Impact was going to become more and more troublesome for the network. The feeling was it was better to move on their own and retain the great relationship they had as opposed to getting to a point where Pop would have to pull them. Any port in a storm.
While nothing has been announced, Impact will likely move to Fridays at 10 PM on The Fight Network in Canada to keep everything airing at the same time.
There are no current plans for replays on Pursuit HD. As of now, it will just be the two-hour broadcast on Fridays.
Impact realizes that the move to Pursuit will see them lose a portion of their former viewership and while some in the company are spinning this as a positive, others are not as happy, feeling it was another step downward in prestige.
The company is working on potential ways for the Impact Wrestling weekly series to be seen on digital platforms, but nothing has been worked out as of this writing. They may be better off just putting the episodes out online at this point.
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