Let me start this by saying that I am a huge fan of Chikara. It's probably my favorite wrestling company. I look forward to Chikara live events far more than WWE, ROH, etc. But over the past six months or so, the company's streaming service has become unreliable. It's very frustrating to pay for a service and not know until the start of the show whether a show will be available on that service or not.

For a little background, Chikara generally has two types of events. The ones that take place at the Wrestle Factory in Philadelphia are important to following the angles and storylines. The ones that take place elsewhere are a little more targeted to kids and families. It's always been a crapshoot whether the non-WF events will be available on the stream or not. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. And honestly, that's fine with me. I get it: they're a tiny company, and they might not know until the last minute whether a certain venue has a fast Internet connection, etc.

But now, many of the WF events aren't available online either, with no reason or warning. Yesterday was Young Lions Cup, one of the banner events of the year, and there was no stream. The only official notification of this that I could find anywhere was a tweet, where Chikara replied to some random fan and told them that they can follow the event using the hashtag instead of streaming it. (?!)

Something even weirder happened with last year's King of Trios tournament, the most important Chikara event. The first night of the tournament was streamed, and then it was removed from the service the next day and the other two weren't streamed either.

I'll say again, I get it: Chikara is a tiny company. And that's part of why I subscribe to it--to support truly independent wrestling, from a creative mind that I have a huge amount of respect for. But for fans outside of Philadelphia, it's starting to fall into the kind of carny hucksterism that's the opposite of everything Quackenbush stands for.