Michelle Yeoh and Vin Diesel will lead an all-star voice cast for an animated series based on Ark: Survival Evolved.
Is Byron Allen’s Paramount Bid The Real Deal?
Is Byron Allen’s $30 billion bid (inclusive of debt) the real deal? Wall Street isn’t sure. Paramount stock ended Wednesday up 6.7% to $14.59, a sizable jump on a day when the overall market was down, but well below Allen’s bid for the company at more than $21 per share. It’s a sign the market is waiting to see Paramount’s next move.
In a memo to staff, Paramount Advertising President John Halley announced the company had hired two executives to head its small and midsized client business and launch the self-service platform. Emily Huo was named SVP of SMB advertising and will be responsible for the company’s go-to-market strategy. Huo had been global director of SMB advertising at Spotify and previously held posts at Reddit and Twitter. Luke Peng joins Paramount as VP of product, SMB Advertising, reporting to Huo. He will develop and optimize products for the SMB platform.
Maria Kyriacou, Paramount Global’s president of broadcast and studios on the international markets side, is leaving the company. This change comes as Paramount scales down its international originals offerings to focus more on the U.S. market. The news was broken to staff in a memo sent by Paramount international boss Pam Kaufman and CBS CEO George Cheeks and aligns with the company’s shifting 2024 strategy.
New York governor Kathy Hochul announced Saturday that Sunday’s Pittsburgh Steelers-Buffalo Bills playoff game schedulled for 1 p.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+ will be rescheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET on Monday, thanks to the massive winter storm hitting the area. The game had originally been scheduled for 1 p.m. ET on Sunday.
As Shari Redstone decides how to part with her empire, a number of players have emerged as suitors — all with varying, and conflicting, motivations to make a bid for the historic studio.
Apple and Paramount Global have discussed bundling their streaming services at a discount, the latest attempt by rival entertainment giants to team up as they look to make their offerings more affordable and attractive. The companies have talked about offering a combination of Paramount+ and Apple TV+ that would cost less than subscribing to both services separately, according to people familiar with the discussions. The discussions are in their early stages, and it is unclear what shape a bundle could take, they said.
Paramount Streaming has elevated the top programming executives at flagship platform Paramount+ and free, ad-supported service Pluto TV. Jeff Grossman, most recently EVP, content & business operations, Paramount Streaming for Paramount+, has been named EVP, Programming, Paramount+. Amy Kuessner, most recently Pluto TV’s EVP, content strategy and global partnerships, has been named EVP, programming, Pluto TV. Both report to Tom Ryan, president-CEO, Paramount Streaming, and will closely collaborate in their new roles.
NCIS: Sydney made its debut on Nov. 14 and, since then, it has amassed nearly 10 million total viewers across CBS and Paramount+. That’s nearly double the live + same-day audience that the episode managed. Based on three days of viewing, NCIS: Sydney is also the most-streamed CBS network premiere ever on Paramount+, according to Paramount Global.
The military drama series starring David Boreanaz will conclude on the Paramount+ streaming service with its seventh season, which is set to go into production in early December and will air in 2024. Originating on CBS, the series moved to Paramount+ with its sixth season. The show was renewed by Paramount+ for Season 7 in January and obviously production was impacted by both the writers and actors strikes.
Willie Nelson’s 90th Birthday Celebration concert special was announced Thursday during Nelson’s appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The two-hour show will air Sunday, Dec. 17 on CBS at 8:30 PT/ET, with streaming live and on-demand via Paramount+.
Paramount Global said it was taking EyeQ, its digital video advertising platform, global. The move will make it easier for multinational marketers to run campaigns across the company’s footprint, which has been boosted by the international expansion of Pluto TV and the launch of the ad-supported version of Paramount+ in Australia, Canada and other markets in 2024.
Like the twisted stalker at the center of its story, Paramount+’s Fatal Attraction series is dead after one season. In addition, Rabbit Hole — the corporate espionage thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland — also will not return for Season 2. Both series’ first seasons will continue to be available on the streaming service.
Paramount is restructuring its streaming operations. The company is combining its product and tech teams leading to the departure of Rob Gelick, who was chief product officer and “played a critical role” of the company’s streaming services. Insiders indicated a few others, mostly junior staffers, are exiting along with Gelick.
The premium plan is set to launch in Australia, Canada, Brazil and Mexico on Nov. 16, the entertainment conglomerate said Monday. Premium subscribers can use four concurrent streams and view content in premium quality formats, including 4K UHD, HDR10, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. “Additional markets will follow,” Paramount said.
Over nearly five decades, Burrows has directed a thousand sitcom episodes. Next up: the new Paramount+ series, which follows Frasier Crane’s return to Boston.
The update of the beloved Nickelodeon series ran for three seasons on the streamer.
The potential end of the Hollywood writers strike sparked a jump on Monday in movie and streaming industry stocks, led by Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount with shares of Disney, AMC Entertainment, and Netflix also rising. Warner Bros and Paramount were the biggest gainers, up 1.44% and 1.5%, respectively. Disney rose 0.5%, while AMC was up 0.6%. Netflix edged higher by 0.5%.
Paramount+ has finally found a home in Japan. Paramount revealed Wednesday that the streaming service and its library will launch in the Japan market on Dec. 1 as a no-additional-cost addition to the on-demand services of local operators J:COM and Wowow. J:COM is one of Japan’s top cable television operators and broadband internet providers, while Wowow is the longstanding leading premium pay channel in the market.
The project among Fox Entertainment, Paramount, ITV, IMDb, Fabric, EIDR and Xperi will be unveiled at IBC. It aims to provide efficient management and delivery of accurate metadata for content.
Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building leapt onto Nielsen’s streaming charts for the week of August 7 to August 13. With the debut of Season 3, the series racked up 719M viewing minutes, making it to No. 9 on the overall Top 10 and No. 3 among streaming originals. According to Nielsen, the audience for Only Murders was a “carbon copy” of the series that’s been dominating streaming for the past eight weeks — Suits. That series had another impressive week with 3B viewing minutes once again across Netflix and Peacock.
Paramount+ saw its first price increase this year with the launch of Paramount+ With Showtime, and Paramount CEO Bob Bakish says it won’t be the streamer’s last. The goal is to hike the cost of Paramount+ With Showtime once again at some point in the next two years. “Our plan is to raise price again, this isn’t our only price increase. Whether we do that in ’25, or we do that in ’24, we’ll see,” Bakish said during a session at a Goldman Sachs-sponsored conference Wednesday. “Again, early days, as we evaluate the cost impact of the price increase, but we believe there’s a lot of room to run there.”
Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish said the Disney-Charter carriage dispute took a “notable” financial toll on many pay-TV stakeholders, but he touted his efforts to “modernize” the company’s distribution relationships for the streaming era. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Tech Conference, Bakish said last Friday was “obviously a notable day for the industry.” That was the first trading day after 18 Disney cable networks and eight ABC stations went dark on Charter’s Spectrum TV service. It brought a collective $15 billion hit to the market value of a number of programmers and operators, Bakish estimated, as the carriage impasse “was interpreted as a negative” by investors. Nevertheless, he continued, “all companies are not of the same point of view” when it comes to co-ordinating their efforts across linear TV, streaming and other lines of business.
Paramount Global shares dipped 2% Thursday morning after word surfaced Wednesday night that the company had abandoned its effort to sell a stake in BET Media Group. Shares fell at one point to $14.58, their lowest level since mid-May, though trading volume was lighter than normal.
The entertainment conglomerate concluded a sale wouldn’t result in any meaningful deleveraging.
The average cost of watching a major ad-free streaming service is going up by nearly 25% in about a year, as entertainment giants bet that customers will either pay up or switch to their cheaper and more-lucrative ad-supported plans.
The buzz about bundling has been steadily growing in TV industry circles since May, when Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav took a break from his usual mustache-twirling to lay out a case for why companies with streaming platforms needed to get on the ball and figure out a way to package their respective services together in one consumer-friendly package — a.k.a. a bundle.