Impact Wrestling is moving to Tuesday nights on AXS TV, beginning with the airing of several of their pay-per-views from 2019.
In a news release, the company confirmed the move to Tuesdays at 8 pm Eastern and will begin on October 1st with an airing of the Homecoming event from January. They will continue in the timeslot with an airing of Rebellion on October 8th, Slammiversary on October 15th, a special called “This is Impact” on October 22nd and the first episode of Impact Wrestling will premiere on Tuesday, October 29th.
The pay-per-views will feature wraparounds with Josh Mathews and Scott D’Amore that the two have filmed. The “This is Impact” special will feature profiles on the talent along with additional matches taped at Bound for Glory on October 20th in Villa Park, Illinois.
This follows the announcement from earlier this month that Anthem Sports and Entertainment had purchased majority control of AXS TV and HDNet Movies.
For Impact, it represents their most solid footing regarding a television home since leaving Spike TV in 2014. The group landed on Destination America in 2015 and remained for one year before moving to Pop TV (the former TV Guide channel). While on Pop, the show peaked with 410,000 viewers in July 2016 for the episode featuring “The Final Deletion” with the Hardys. They remained on Pop until the end of 2018 where they were averaging 124,000 viewers over the final ten weeks of programs.
In January 2019, they moved to the Pursuit Channel, which Anthem owns a portion of, while simulcasting the flagship program on Twitch. The platform lessened visibility by a significant margin with Pursuit numbers low enough that they did not appear among the top 150 cable programs on Friday nights.
We are awaiting word on how this will affect the Canadian broadcasts of Impact on Fight Network and Game TV.
