TKO COO Mark Shapiro spoke at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference on Wednesday and revealed that the WWE and Netflix discussions originally focused on the WWE NXT brand only.

Shapiro stated that with the deal, they cracked the code to bring live sports to Netflix, and that the partnership alone de-risked the UFC/WWE merger that spawned the creation of TKO Group Holdings.

Shapiro added that the WWE will be highly visible when users log in to the service and that for TKO, it is a good neighborhood to be in with the Netflix/WWE deal, the NBCUniversal/WWE deal and the Disney/ESPN deal with the UFC brand.