Last week, Impact Wrestling officially announced their new television deal with Pursuit Channel to air their flagship show in the United States starting on January 11th. Although Anthem owns the station, the show will remain at 10 p.m. ET which is the same time slot that the show has been airing at since October on Pop TV.

Longtime pro wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer shed some light on this situation during the latest edition of Wrestling Observer Radio as the reason that Impact decided to move to Friday’s is all due to a long-term plan by the promotion as they took SmackDown Live’s move to FOX this October into consideration.

It was brought up that wrestling is important to The Fight Network because they recently lost UFC, and decided to move Impact to Friday’s as they believe that once WWE fans are done watching SmackDown then they would tune into Impact at 10 p.m ET.