Tyler Breeze Talks WWE Banning Talent's Twitch Streams

In an appearance on Insight With Chris Van Vliet, former WWE star Tyler Breeze talked about building his brand outside of the wrestling ring. Breeze, a regular on Xavier Woods' UpUpDownDown program, credited it and Woods for helping to raise his and other wrestlers' profile.

"Building our value outside of the ring was always the goal for us," Breeze said. "Luckily, UpUpDownDown has done wonders for us. Creed is awesome like that. He will take guys that you just know from their matches. Maybe they don't get to talk a lot and you get to know what kind of a person they are and they have really good personalities. So he will put them in a spot where you will get to see that personality.

"All of a sudden you go 'wow I want to see more of that guy, he is really cool.' Maybe the only place that you get to see that is UpUpDownDown. Now, not only is he building his own stock, but he is helping everybody around him. Rising tides lift all boats, he lives by that. It's not just for him, it's as many people as he can help, and he will. If I didn't do this, I would just be another random guy trying to get my foot in the door."

Last year the WWE came under fire for threatening, and then forcing, its wrestlers off third party affiliates, most notable Twitch. Despite being affected by that, Breeze offered a defense of WWE's actions.

"So it was a little different," Breeze said. "So obviously everybody kind of threw their hands up in the air when they kind of stopped everything. There's a saying that's been around and will last; 'the boys will mess it up for the boys.' I was streaming on Twitch for 2 years and no one was really paying attention to anything, because I was doing it properly. In the end, when you are under a certain banner, it's like media training. If something happens, let's say I'm live, and I represent myself horribly. When you sign onto a big company, the headline doesn't read 'Matt Clement does this', it now says 'WWE Superstar' or 'AEW Superstar did this.' Now you have to be mature enough to realize you represent a bigger entity and conduct yourself accordingly."

"People then realized they could do this Twitch streams and they don't present themselves accordingly. Whether it's using their intellectual property, or giving away things they shouldn't be giving away. They just violate certain things, and eventually the guy who is charge of everything will say 'you know what? Everything stops, you ruined it.' They can't go case by case of 'you're okay but you are not okay.' They just go 'you guys stop.' And honestly from a business standpoint, if you ran a business and you had all this stuff, would you let it go? You would blanket it and say 'guys, this has to stop.'"

You can watch the full interview below.