Impact Wrestling, formerly known as TNA, was once the #2 professional wrestling company in the United States. Since then, its spot has been stolen by All Elite Wrestling and even arguably Ring of Honor. It’s back on television now, but at one point its fall from grace saw it without any major TV deal, leading Impact Wrestling to start streaming its shows live on Twitch. Impact has continued its Twitch livestreams, but now it’s been banned from the service for an undetermined amount of time.
The latest episode of Impact Wrestling featured a segment where Rob Van Dam was “celebrating” his win from the recent Hard to Kill pay-per-view event. In the segment, Van Dam is seen in bed with his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s girlfriend. What proceeds is a highly sexual scene involving blurred nudity and whipped cream. Even though the nudity was blurred, it appears as though it was still enough for Twitch to ban Impact Wrestling from the service. It should be noted, however, that an official reason hasn’t been released at this time.
Twitch has been known to ban streamers for accidental wardrobe malfunctions, so it makes sense for the company to ban Impact Wrestling for this, especially when it was done on purpose. However, since this is Impact Wrestling’s first Twitch ban, it’s likely that the company will return to the service sooner rather than later. Typically bans like these last for just about three days, so the channel may very well be back up by the end of the weekend.
If Impact Wrestling does return to Twitch, it will be interesting to see if it modifies its content to avoid another ban. It’s unlikely that Impact will shy away from content like this, as the adult focus has really become the company’s identity in recent years, but maybe it will opt to leave these kinds of segments off its Twitch channel.
Impact Wrestling itself doesn’t appear to have released a statement on its ban, instead using its social media to post highlights of the most recent episode of Impact and promote the upcoming Lockdown pay-per-view event.
In the meantime, it doesn’t seem like this will trigger any kind of Twitch ban controversy. This seems to be a pretty cut and dry case of Impact Wrestling violating Twitch’s terms of service and getting a temporary ban hammer for it.
