Bryan Danielson: People Will Tune In "If You Put On Excellent Professional Wrestling"

At the 2024 SXSW convention, Bryan Danielson shared his insights on how AEW's programming competes with WWE and other television shows, particularly reflecting on AEW's head-to-head with NXT. Danielson emphasized a focus on AEW's unique strengths rather than the competition: "In my mind, and this is probably different from the way Tony [Khan] views it from a business perspective. I don’t necessarily look at what the competitors are doing. On that particular night, I wasn’t worried about it. My thing is, focus on what we do best. We do things differently, and our fanbase loves the way we do things. let’s embrace the things that we do really well and put on our best possible show and not worry about necessarily about what’s going on on a different channel."

He highlighted the continuous challenge of engaging audiences amidst various distractions: "Realistically, it’s not just that particular Tuesday night. It’s every Wednesday and every week you’re battling something. You’re not just battling other shows. You’re battling people’s addiction to their phones and all sorts of things. How do you keep people’s attention? In my mind, it keeps going back to this idea of quality. Something I said when I first joined AEW is that if you put on excellent professional wrestling, people will tune in. That’s the goal weekly. Put on an excellent professional wrestling show."