Paramount

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.

VICE, the documentary TV series that launched on HBO in 2013 and in more recent years called Showtime home, is the latest program to be “disappeared” from the Paramount+ With Showtime streaming service. VICE previously had been available on the Showtime app, and then for a hot second moved to Paramount+ With Showtime (after the Paramount+/Showtime merger).

Go big and go broad – that is Paramount Global’s strategy as it formally raises the curtain Tuesday on the Paramount+ With Showtime premium tier on the company’s primary streaming platform.

Executives from Paramount, Sinclair, Graham Media, Grass Valley and swXtch.io will discuss advances in linear playout for live sports and news in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch webinar on July 20. Register here.

Media mogul Tyler Perry refuses to cough up the $3 billion-plus that Paramount is asking in an auction of Black Entertainment Television — and the fierce haggling has begun to throw a sale into doubt. Perry has been considered the frontrunner to win the auction for BET Group, whose properties include cable channels BET and VH1 along with the BET+ streaming service. But Perry is losing patience with the drawn-out process after making an offer that’s short of $3 billion — a price tag that other investors also consider to be lofty, according to a source close to the situation.

The Paramount+ series shoots in Butte, Mont., and makes use of the city’s Civic Center. Civic Center manager Bill Melvin tells the NBC Montana that 1923‘s production team let him know that the delay stems from the strike, which began May 2.

Jenny Tartikoff has stepped down as Paramount’s EVP of Global Communications, president and CEO Brian Robbins announced Wednesday. Tartikoff’s departure from the studio is effective immediately.

In the latest wave of industry layoffs, the recently combined Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios as well as Paramount Media Networks, overseen by the division’s President and CEO Chris McCarthy, is reducing its domestic team by 25% today. McCarthy addressed the cuts, which he called a “very hard but necessary decision”, in a company memo. According to sources, the basic cable networks were most heavily impacted, with a number of units being shut down as part of consolidation, mostly on the operations side.

“We’re not going back to the old way of doing things,” says ad sales head John Halley.

Paramount has announced that the Kevin Costner-fronted Yellowstone will wrap its run with the upcoming second half of season five, which is set to premiere in November. It will be followed by an untitled sequel, from 101 Studios and MTV Entertainment Studios, which has received a straight-to-series order for a December debut. No talent has been announced for the new series but it appears Matthew McConaughey remains in negotiations to star.

Roz is back! Peri Gilpin is returning to Frasier-verse as a guest star on the Paramount+ sequel series. In the original series set in Seattle, Roz Doyle was the titular character’s producer on his Dr. Frasier Crane Show on KACL-AM. When viewers last saw the character in the series finale, she becomes station manager. Her role in the new series is as yet unknown. The return of Gilpin follows the reveal that Bebe Neuwirth would return as Lilith Sternin in the sequel.

Two months after Warner Bros. filed a lawsuit against Paramount over streaming rights to the long-running animated series South Park, Paramount Global has finally responded with a lawsuit of its own. In a countersuit filed in the New York Supreme Court, Paramount says Warner Bros. owes it more than $52 million in unpaid licensing fees.

Mo’Nique has filed a lawsuit alleging that Paramount and CBS owe her millions in profit participation from her show The Parkers. The show ran for five seasons on UPN, from 1999 through 2004. The show’s creators — Ralph Farquhar, Sara Finney-Johnson and Vida Spears — filed a similar lawsuit last June, alleging that CBS had engaged in various forms of “financial malfeasance” to artificially inflate expenses and suppress profit payments. The network settled that case out of court in November.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been renewed for Season 3 while Star Trek: Lower Decks has been renewed for Season 5 at Paramount+. The new seasons of both shows will consist of 10 episodes. In addition, Season 2 of Strange New Worlds and Season 4 of Lower Decks will both debut this summer.

Paramount CEO Bob Bakish’s compensation for 2022 was $32.05 million, up from $20.06 million in 2021, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bakish received a stock award of $16 million. He did not receive a stock award in 2021. He got a $16 million stock award in 2020, when his compensation was $39 million. Paramount also announced the  addition of Dawn Ostroff as an independent, non-executive director.

Paramount is exploring a potential sale of a majority stake in its BET business, which includes BET, VH1 and the BET+ streaming service. Among interested buyers are Tyler Perry, a longtime partner of BET, who is engaged in conversations to buy the stake., and Byron Allen, who controls a number of local TV stations as well as The Weather Channel and other assets via his Allen Media Group and Entertainment Studios firms. “Byron Allen is interested in buying BET, and he will be pursuing the acquisition of the network,” a rep for the mogul says.

Paramount is exploring a potential sale of a majority stake in its BET business, which includes BET, VH1, and the BET+ streaming service, a source familiar with the matter says. The source cautioned that the discussions are still in the early stages, and there is no guarantee of any transaction taking place. They added that if a deal closes, Paramount expects to maintain a minority stake in the business, as well as a commercial relationship. Scott Mills is BET’s CEO.

ATSC 3.0 has hit a sludgy stretch of path toward its end goal of broad U.S. adoption and providing new content services. It will take many hands — a potential FCC task force, station group cooperation and an elongated pipeline for receivers included — to get the standard’s implementation flying again.

The premium cable network overhauls its slate around franchises after its merger with streamer Paramount+.

Creator Taylor Sheridan needs another season to finish telling the origin story of the Dutton family he made famous in Yellowstone. And there’s always the chance Season 2 could attract the same number of people who first tuned into the premiere of 1923 in December: The prequel that stars Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren was the most watched Paramount+ premiere ever in the U.S. and drew in 7.4 million total viewers across Paramount+ and linear previews.

After expanding his role to include Nickelodeon Studios back in March, Paramount COO Andrew Gumpert is exiting the Melrose lot, effective this week. The announcement as just made by studio boss Brian Robbins Thursday night. We hear that Gumpert’s exit was amicable, with the exec telling staffers in Robbins’ memo: “I’ve been contemplating the next chapter of my career and I’m excited to figure out what’s next. I am confident that this organization will continue to lead the industry.”

Paramount Global will provide FuboTV with a CBS network feed — stripped of local programming — to stream in markets where CBS affiliates turned down a distribution fee deal negotiated by the network. According to a confidential memo sent to affiliates by the CBS affiliate board, CBS set a 5 p.m. Friday (Jan. 27) deadline for stations to opt in or out of the deal. In markets where stations opt out, their programming will be replaced with the network feed on Fubo effective today at 5 p.m. The national feed, including sports and primetime shows, with use content from the CBS News Streaming Network to replace a station’s local programming including local newscasts, CBS said. The new deal would run until after CBS airs the Super Bowl in 2024.

The newly formed Joint Industry Committee aims to set measurement, currency standards by an aggressive March 1 deadline. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Paramount told CBS affiliates that they had until 5 p.m. today to agree to a retransmission consent deal that it had struck with Fubo or they would replace them on the vMVPD with a CBS “network feed” without the affiliates’ local programming, according to a CBS affiliate board email sent Friday afternoon to its members.

The streamer has picked up a seventh season of the David Boreanaz-led drama. It will be the third installment that’s exclusive to Paramount+; the series ran for four seasons on CBS before moving platforms with season 5 in fall 2021.

Paramount Pictures’ Top Gun: Maverick became Paramount+’s  most-watched movie premiere in its first weekend (Dec. 22-25), surpassing the previous record-holder, Sonic the Hedgehog, by 60%, according to the studio. Paramount+, the revamped successor to CBS All Access, launched in the U.S. and some other markets in March 2021.