second in a series. Previously:
The last video on the Tercera Caida channel went up on December 31, 2014. The long-time TVC Deportes program, a recap of lucha libre (and pro wrestling elsewhere) plus in-studio interviews, would cease to exist. The channel lost WWE programming, and so the secondary wrestling programming was going there. Jose Manuel Guillen, the only host of the show in the video, mentioned the new YouTube channel they had started earlier in the year as a sidenote to hopes to resume the program on a different network. Tercera Caida has never returned. It would be reasonable to expect the different hosts and people working on the show to disperse. Maybe they’d show up on another wrestling program, but the concept of the show, covering everything in the world of Mexican wrestling, would be a fond memory of the past. It wasn’t conceivable Tercera Caida could exist without the network support. It was always a mild surprise TVC Deportes treated lucha libre with enough respect to give a recap show an hour every week. It would be no surprise if no one else did.
Tercera Caida exists now only as a starting point, a first act greatly overshadowed by the next. That new YouTube channel has become the second biggest lucha libre channel on the internet – behind only AAA, ahead of CMLL. It is being the destination for lucha libre from around Mexico and occasionally elsewhere. What was a half-hour of highlights on TVC Deportes has turned into hours and hours of new clips each week, interviews from shows and longer sit down discussions. It is the home of matches and full shows streaming almost every day of the week, frequently live. It is such the leader in lucha libre, especially independent lucha libre, that promotions put the channel’s logo on the poster as if a certification of approval. It is +LuchaTV
(I distinctly remember sitting in a Casa de Toño in Mexico City where Jose Manuel Guillen showed me some artwork for the +LuchaTV YouTube channel while explaining the concept. I thought it was one of those solid ideas that come up in wrestling, which probably will never go anywhere. That was not my best call.)
A third major promotion was high on the wishlist of diehard lucha libre fans for years. +LuchaTV essentially has become that, by bundling many other groups together. Most every notable non-CMLL/AAA promotion has had anywhere between clips and full shows on the channel, with hours of new content dropped every day. +LuchaTV professionally produces their shows, making them stand out in quality over the many fan channels and even some of the work of the major television groups. It’s highlighted new talent – both in the ring and as announcers, giving employment and exposure to people unlikely to break thru into the major promotions without it. (As the decade came to an end, Guillen had ascended to being a commentator for AAA’s Space/Twitch show, while Guzman was announcing for Nacion Lucha Libre, in addition to the +LuchaTV work.) With the addition of Welcome to My Barrio in 2019, it even seems like there may be promotions that exist primarily to be content for the channel, hoping the exposure there leads to work elsewhere. +LuchaTV still doesn’t seem to be significantly understood outside of the Mexican wrestling scene but is a massive factor inside of it.
There are other YouTube channels, other sites that get the same poster inclusion – Estrellas del Ring comes to mind – but no other has risen to the status of +Lucha. There are many big and small filming groups in the US, but there’s almost no one else filming and editing independent wrestling outside of +Lucha. There are no competitors for what they’re doing. That also means +LuchaTV has a tremendous amount of power in independent lucha libre; they’re deciding which promotions get featured when they get featured, how soon after taking place they’re featured, and how much of the matches get shown. The promotions likely have a role in those decisions, and it doesn’t appear +Lucha got into this role looking for that power.
Still, there are no comparable alternatives if a promotion wanted to look elsewhere. (There are alternatives, they’re not equivalent. 2019 saw IWRG some shows being live-streamed both by +LuchaTV and actual TV network AYM Sports, with the YouTube channel production so blowing away the TV network that comparing the two seems unfair.) Also, only +LuchaTV & the promotions seem to know how the arrangement works; it’s unclear who would own the video if a promotion ever decided to separate. We do know that most of the promotions don’t have their own YouTube presence outside of +LuchaTV’s channel. +Lucha is careful to give each group their personalized intro and graphics to keep them distinct, but the groups functionally exist on YouTube as no more than separate playlists on +LuchaTV’s channel.
+LuchaTV has tremendous power in this relationship. They could choose winners and losers from promotions if they wanted. They’ve seemed to stay away from that so far. Wrestling is often about (stupid) territory arguments, and it says a lot for +LuchaTV that no one’s come after them about something so far. (The closest is whatever’s happened with Lucha Memes, where both sides are insisting a little too loudly that everything is fine even while +LuchaTV is no longer filming shows.) My concern could be much ado about nothing, brought on by looking at from the outside. This power balance would inevitably lead to in-fighting and ugly breakups in the US. Outside of those rare blips, everyone seems peaceful and content with the status quo in Mexico.
It’d be great to see everything continuing smoothly the same for the next decade. It’s hard to imagine it’ll be precisely the same. Tercera Caida had 3 people in front of the camera. +LuchaTV has a rotating group of at least eight announcers with more staff behind the scenes. The people involved seem to be doing primarily because of their passion for lucha libre, but the amount of work that goes into suggests someone’s making money from +LuchaTV, or holding out hope for a big payoff down the road. It’s tough to keep things stable when money is involved – the danger in the future is promotions looking for a more significant cut of their own, or people seeing the money come in and trying their hand at doing something similar. Or maybe it turns out the money doesn’t support the time, and the doors opened up elsewhere – like in AAA – become the fulltime focusing, leaving no one covering the indie shows the same way? What +LuchaTV accomplished this decade was incredible, but it’s not clear if all of this – the workload, the staff-hours, the amount of announcing – can be sustainable. Maybe it’ll all be profitable for everyone involved, but it seems worth taking a moment to enjoy the changes +LuchaTV has brought as if they won’t be around forever.
Guzman’s doing AAA’s English commentary, too, isn’t he?