Tony Khan has addressed the issues that affected AEW WrestleDream for those who bought the show on Amazon Prime.
On October 18, fans took to social media to voice their complaints on the streaming service, which repeatedly cut out throughout the night and led to the main event of Jon Moxley vs. Darby Allin not being streamed on the show.
It should be noted that Features of Wrestling purchased the show ahead of time on Amazon to watch on demand the following day. The show would initially not load the replay, and when it did the total runtime was around 2 hours, much shorter than the total runtime of the PPV. The feed cut shortly after the match between Mercedes Mone and Mina Shirakawa began, meaning that the final 3 matches were not shown on the broadcast. Upon contacting Amazon, a refund was issued. The show was then purchased on a separate platform, which had no performance problems.
Tony Khan Says AEW Not To Blame For Amazon Issue
With the issues being picked up by the media, Khan was asked about the technical difficulties at the post-show press conference, to which he responded that it was an Amazon issue and not an AEW issue, noting that other providers were not affected by the same issue:
“It’s something out of AEW’s control. It was a technical problem with the Amazon delivery. I think our other streams are unaffected. It was something with their systems internally there. It does remind me, to some extent, of what happened earlier this summer with Death Before Dishonor because to be honest, those are two of my favorite pay-per-views of the entire year. I also think it was, start to finish, a perfect show, and I remember walking into the scrum with the exact same feeling in the sense of I thought the show was perfect, I thought the wrestlers delivered, the crowd delivered and the whole team backstage and in the ring delivered, and I was so proud of everybody in AEW and it was just this technical thing completely out of our control with a streaming provider, and in this case, it was a similar thing.”
Continuing, Khan added that he hoped that Amazon could fix the issue for the on demand version, adding that it reminded him of a similar problem that affected a previous ROH show:
“I thought the show was perfect, the wrestling was perfect and the replay’s gonna be available there for everybody through them and I think they’ll address that and hopefully Amazon will get that figured out but for AEW, everybody here did a fantastic job. I was really glad to hear that HBO Max delivered the pay-per-view without any issues. All of our other providers did really well. But that was an unusual thing and it did remind me because we had a problem with just certain web browsers that were affected for that Death Before Dishonor show and in that case, I was able to at least address it because it was a streaming service that I owned,” Khan laughed.
The Death Before Dishonor show that was affected by the technical problems was later uploaded to YouTube. At the time of writing, there has been no word on whether part or all of AEW WrestleDream will be made available free to fans.
H/t to Fightful for the use of transcriptions.
Featured image: AEW
