Vince McMahon explains the role of ECW in the WWE brand structure

Vince McMahon was asked during the annual shareholders meeting whether he's happy with the ECW brand. "Currently, I am happy with ECW in terms of it's format," McMahon said. "I'm unhappy with the television ratings, but more times than not it's the No. 1 show on Sci-Fi... ECW is used in a different way than it was in the past. ECW at one time was a wild west, shoot 'em up, bang-bang. You can't continue that way, so the ECW brand had to morph anyhow...

"You'll see some of our younger talent on ECW and once they garner a certain amount of experience and we understand that the public likes them in some way we can move them to Raw or Smackdown. I won't say that it's a farm system, it's really not. We have a great farm system down in Florida - Florida Championship Wrestling. It's where a lot of our new performers enter the major leagues, so to speak, is ECW, and it's working out well for everybody."

Powell's POV: The recent Hollywood Reporter feature story on WWE mentioned that WWE and Sci-Fi are in the process of coming up with ideas to rebrand ECW, but that didn't come up during the shareholders meeting. You can view the entire shareholders meeting by visiting WWE.com.