Decided for a change of pace I'd give an old WWE (I know WWF but I'm just going to keep using WWE) In Your House PPV Event from May 14, 1995. I've never seen any of these before, because I was busy wrestling most weekends during this time period, and as a struggling wrestler I'm not sure I even had PPV capability at my house.
For those who aren't familiar with the IYH concept they were smaller mini-PPVs if you will that were added back when WWE just had their big 4 PPVs each year. They were smaller than the usual PPV event and cheaper. The first few were just called In Your House, then eventually they added an event name to them as well, and before too long the IYH moniker was dropped and they just became full blown regular PPVs like we had up until the introduction of the WWE Network.
To promote this first IYH event WWE ran a contest to give away an actual house. It was an estate type house in Orlando Florida on a golf course. I think you had to mail in your application and then order and watch the PPV and they would draw one winner and call them live during the show. They did and some dude from Nevada won the house.
I'm not sure what standard PPV events were doing in 1995 but this show pulled 332,000 buys on PPV. Apart from WrestleMania and perhaps the Royal Rumble this many buys would be considered a big success in 2014, and I'm pretty sure 1995 was considered a down year. The Live event featured 10 matches but only 6 of them aired live on PPV. Vince McMahon and Dok Hendrix (Michael Hayes) were on commentary.
wrath