Where can I watch WWE wrestling in Canada in 2025?

World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the largest and best-known professional wrestling promotion which has made stars of performers like Becky Lynch, John Cena, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, has long been available on Canadian television — most recently through Rogers Communications' Sportsnet 360 channel, as well as the Rogers-distributed Canadian version of the WWE Network.

However, starting in 2025, there will be a big change in how Canadians, and much of the rest of the world, will get WWE programming.

Effective January 1, 2025, the only place that Canadians will be able to access all televised WWE programming will be the Netflix streaming service. If you're in Canada and you want to watch Monday Night Raw or Friday Night SmackDown in a way authorized by WWE, you will have to watch it through Netflix. Netflix will also be the primary, if not exclusive, Canadian home of WWE's premium live events like WrestleMania, the Royal Rumble, and SummerSlam, as we explain below.

The only WWE in-ring programs available on traditional (non-streaming) TV in Canada will be those also available on American broadcast networks like NXT on The CW and the quarterly Saturday Night's Main Event specials on NBC — and these should all be available on Netflix as well.

What's this Netflix deal all about?

On January 23, 2024, WWE announced a multi-year partnership with Netflix. The headline that many focused on was WWE bringing its flagship weekly series, Monday Night Raw, exclusively to Netflix as existing agreements expire — with the deal taking effect in January 2025 in the United States, Canada, and a few other countries.

But in fact, in every country where Netflix is available other than the U.S. — including in Canada — the service will be "the home for all WWE shows and specials [...] inclusive of Raw and WWE’s other weekly shows — SmackDown and NXT — as well as the company’s Premium Live Events., [...] award-winning documentaries, original series and forthcoming projects."

The deal has a nominal length of ten years, with Netflix paying US$5 billion to WWE over that time — but Netflix has the option to either curtail the deal after five years, or extend it to twenty years. So depending on how things go — and Netflix's financial appetite — the deal could run until either the end of 2029, the end of 2034, or the end of 2044.

So it's not just Raw that will be leaving cable TV in Canada?

That's what it looks like. To be fair, that Netflix announcement also mentioned WWE programming would be added to Netflix in different countries "as available". But we know that the most recent announcement regarding Sportsnet's WWE rights stated its agreement ran through 2024, so we don't have any reason to believe that any of Rogers' WWE rights in Canada would extend beyond the end of that year.

We also know for certain that the version of WWE Network available through Canadian cable providers will no longer be available after December 31, 2024, as has been confirmed by a number of providers including Rogers itself.

At the risk of splitting hairs, we note that while for Raw, WWE said Netflix would be its exclusive home in Canada, WWE's announcement did not say that Netflix would be the exclusive home of its other programming in Canada – just "the home". But that might just be accounting for spillover from U.S. broadcasts (as we get into in a bit below).

What about WWE's non-wrestling programming on A&E and Disney+?

For those unfamiliar: from time to time, WWE has produced reality series related to its performers, like Total Divas and Total Bellas which aired on E! from 2014 to 2021.

More recently, it has partnered with A&E for a set of (mostly) documentary series under the "Superstar Sunday" banner — including WWE Rivals and Biography: WWE Legends. Many episodes of these series have also repeated on Sportsnet 360 and other Rogers channels. The Disney+ (and Hulu U.S.) series would be Love & WWE: Bianca & Montez (as in Bianca Belair and Montez Ford), which premiered in February 2024.

As of this writing in October 2024, it's not entirely clear whether any more episodes of these series will be forthcoming. If there are, most likely they will continue to be available through their existing services, but it's very likely that any future projects along those lines will be exclusive to Netflix in Canada. There is also a strong possibility of past episodes of the aforementioned series eventually becoming available on Netflix as well.

Is there anywhere else I will be able to watch WWE programming in Canada?

At least for the next few years, a couple of WWE programs will be available on U.S. broadcast networks, and therefore could potentially be available to Canadian viewers who don't want Netflix.

The CW — available in Canada through some border stations like WNLO Buffalo, plus premium superstations like WGN and WPIX — will carry WWE's developmental series NXT. But we should emphasize that there will still be multiple NXT-branded premium live events each year which will not air on The CW, and we expect that they will only be available on Netflix in Canada.

The other program airing on American broadcast TV will be Saturday Night's Main Event, a series of occasional televised events which was revived in December 2024 and will air quarterly on NBC until at least late 2029.

Additionally, we would not be surprised if WWE's main-roster premium live events continue to be available for purchase on pay-per-view (PPV) — much as they were available during the WWE Network era — albeit still at a considerably inflated price compared to accessing them through a monthly subscription.

For weekly main-roster programming, however, the possibility of an alternate home is a long shot at best. And again, all of the above programs — NXT, SNME, and PLEs — will also be on Netflix. So if you're subscribing to Netflix anyways for Raw and SmackDown, there probably won't be much reason to look for other shows elsewhere.

There is one WWE wrestling program that is only distributed on social media: WWE Speed, a weekly match with a short time limit. This is, and will remain, a global exclusive to the X social network (formerly known as Twitter). It will not be affected by the deal with Netflix.

Significant revisions

• October 23, 2024 — initial publication