Wrestle Kingdom 9 was a professional wrestling pay-per-view event produced by the New Japan Pro Wrestling promotion. It was the 24th January 4 Tokyo Dome Show and the first event on the 2015 NJPW schedule. In the double main event, Shinsuke Nakamura successfully defended the IWGP Intercontinental Championship against Kota Ibushi. The event was broadcast on American PPV as the first GFW event.
About Wrestle Kingdom 9 in brief
Wrestle Kingdom 9 in Tokyo Dome was a professional wrestling pay-per-view event produced by the New Japan Pro Wrestling promotion. It was the 24th January 4 Tokyo Dome Show and the first event on the 2015 NJPW schedule. The event featured ten professional wrestling matches and one pre-show match, six of which were for championships. In the double main event, Shinsuke Nakamura successfully defended the IWGP Intercontinental Championship against Kota Ibushi. The GFW version of the event was streamed worldwide on the Flipps application for Internet-connected smartphones, tablet computers and smart TVs. The appearance of Pro Wrestling Noah wrestlers led to a storyline in which N JPW’s Suzuki-gun group began wrestling at Noah events starting the week after Wrestle Kingdom 9. In January 2016, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter stated that Wrestle Kingdom9 was the only live pro wrestling PPV event ever broadcast from Japan. The four-hour telecast was available from pay- per-view providers in the United States, including DirecTV, Dish Network, AT&T U-verse, Comcast, Verizon FiOS and all cable systems, and in Canada from Bell ExpressVu, Rogers, Shaw, Sasktel and Telus. It also aired live on New Japanprowrestling.com, an Internet streaming site introduced by NJPw in early December 2014 which reportedly had 20,000 subscribers worldwide in late January 2015. The show was available live and on-demand for 30 days after its initial airing.
The price for the event in the U.S. was USD 34; the price for New Japan pro-wrestling in Japan alone was USD 95; the GFW broadcast of Wrestle Kingdom World alone was $42; and the stream would not run on three of the four most used devices: Chromecast, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. In Japan, the event also aired on PPV in SKY PerfecTV!’s Sukachan service, and it was available in Japan on January 4, 2015, and January 6, 2015 on SKY Prowrestling! The event was broadcast on American PPV as the first GFW event. On November 4, GFW announced that it would present the event live on American pay-Per-view television and that it had a PPV market of 125 million homes. Jim Ross would be the lead announcer for its version ofThe event was Jim Ross’s first professional-w wrestling broadcast since his departure from WWE. Others considered for the color commentary were John Pollock, Mauro Ranallo and Kevin Nash, but GFW settled on Matt Striker before the event, before the company decided not to air the event before the end of the year. A Tanahashi–Okada heavyweight title match had headlined Wrestle Kingdom 7 two years earlier and was also the main event the following year at Wrestle Kingdom 10. Although the IwGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship was successfully defended, the NEVER Openweight Championship changed hands.
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This page is based on the article Wrestle Kingdom 9 published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
