RADICAN’S TAKE: A recap of my difficult experience trying to watch WWE Wrestlepalooza on ESPN Unlimted

This past week my experience with ESPN Unlimited has been nothing short of unpleasant. It’s hard to access it. R-Truth couldn’t even properly articulate to people on the Smackdown before Wrestlepalooza last week how they could watch the show on ESPN Unlimited. I haven’t seen people ask this many questions about how to access a wrestling show since ROH was airing iPPVs on Go Fight Live when the questions “Will this be available in the U.K.” became a meme of sorts on social media for folks asking questions about how to access the shows.

ESPN and my cable provider haven’t made a deal yet for people that have ESPN to be able to use their cable login to access ESPN Unlimited. Fine, I can deal with that. ESPN has told us they’re going to be making deals in the months to come and WWE and ESPN weren’t supposed to be a thing until next year, so ESPN gets some grace from me there.

I have a Disney+ bundle and adding ESPN to that didn’t cost me much extra to upgrade. Adding ESPN Unlimited to my Disney+ account was the easy part. The hard part? Accessing it on my TV. No matter what I did, my ESPN app on my Amazon Firestick wouldn’t boot up. I tried the ESPN app on my smart TV and this time it did work. I synced up my account, but for some reason the app on my smart TV would not let me regulate the volume of my TV with any of my remotes no matter what I did.

This was as far as I got on Saturday. I watched the AEW PPV in the afternoon and then did a nearly three hour post-show on YouTube with Brian Zilem. I had had enough wrestling for one day after that. I had planned to watch Wrestlepalooza Sunday, but I still couldn’t get it to work on my Firestick. Finally I noticed an ad on the main page of my Firestick for ESPN Unlimited. I clicked on it and signed into my account and it took me to the Disney+ app.

I did some exploring and clicked on ESPN on Disney+ and found Wrestlepalooza easily. Problem solved, right? Wrong. The week got away from me and I didn’t get to finish the show until today. When I went to watch Wrestlepalooza today, I went to the ESPN app and then navigated over to the WWE category, which took awhile to get to. One would think with Wrestlepalooza being hyped like TBSSWMSSSSCIP (The Biggest Show Since WrestleMania Since SummerSlam, Since Clash in Paris) would be front and center in the ESPN section on DIsney+. Wrong!

I opened the WWE category and there was no Wrestlepalooza proper. There was the Wrestlepalooza pre-show, post-show, and ESPN special, but actual Wrestlepalooza. “What in the Go Fight Live is going on here?,” I said to myself. I had to back out to the main menu of Disney+ and use the search tool to find Wrestlepalooza. Life isn’t supposed to be this hard in 2025!

By the time I got to streaming Wrestlepalooza, I had an idea of what was going through the mind of William Foster in “Falling Down.” Shame on ESPN and WWE for jumping into bed together and rushing out this show and hyping it like TBSSWMSSSSCIP only for me to have to jump through multiple hoops just to watch it. They need to do better, as surely a show as big as Wrestlepalooza should be easy to stream in 2025.

To make matters worse, this recap of my experience with accessing ESPN Unlimited is just my story experience. I’ve heard others complain of worse than what I experienced including being told they would be able to access ESPN Unlimited with their cable login only for it to not work when they went to login to watch the show. Hopefully ESPN can find a way to make the WWE content easier to navigate and access moving forward.

Contact Sean at pwtorchsean@gmail.com. Follow him on X @SR_Torch and on BlueSky @SeanRadican