Uncle Dave has a juicy piece of "news" floating around for us. According to Meltzer, WWE will begin airing NXT on FS1 on Wednesday nights between 8 and 10 pm est to run head to head with AEW on TNT. According to the report, WWE and Fox finalized this deal sometime in late June or early July WWE hasn't officially announced anything but, according to Meltzer, WWE has been planning to move NXT to FS1 for a while now and, to be fair, there's been quite a bit of chatter about it off and on over the course of this year. It also hasn't been announced when NXT would begin airing and whether or not if would take air at Full Sale University.
The working idea is that NXT will air each week as a live two-hour show. The internal feeling is that a taped show will not work up against AEW, which will air live each week also. WWE officials feel like they have a strong edge over AEW, that being the endless supply of main roster Superstars that they can put on the NXT show whenever they want to. WWE also has another strong advantage and that's being able to promote the show on RAW and SmackDown, as well as other Fox programming. The report states that NXT being frequently plugged on Fox and USA, along with WWE being the more recognized and biggest brand compared to AEW, is something that WWE officials will offset the fact that AEW will air on TNT, which is a more well known and higher rated channel than FS1.
As far as a ratings war goes, I think AEW has a better shot of going toe to toe with NXT rather than Raw or SmackDown. Neither FS1 or TNT have a lot of hit shows, I think TNT only has one show currently drawing over a million viewers each week, and NXT is something more akin to AEW than Raw or SmackDown is.
If this turns out to be accurate, which is probably will be, then I admit that I fear for NXT as this could definitely mean Vince will be taking a much more active role in NXT, especially if NXT isn't blowing AEW out of the water or, worse for them, is losing to AEW in the ratings.