A segment on CBS Sunday Morning featured criticism of an interview airing on the company’s streaming service Paramount+.
ViacomCBS’s finance chief is tasked with reallocating funds toward the company’s new streaming service Paramount+ — launching Thursday — without starving its much bigger television business.
Exclusives
Its backers hope the ViacomCBS streaming platform will be a smorgasbord of offerings — with live sports and news, reboots of properties like Frasier and Rugrats, original shows like Star Trek: Discovery and the ViacomCBS library — that will entice viewers. But its relatively late entrance to a competitive landscape and a $4 price increase compared to its predecessor, CBS All Access, could make it a challenging sell.
CBS has set a date for the 73rd annual Emmy Awards, which will also be streamed on Paramount+. The Awards will take place on Sunday, Sept. 19, at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET. Host and venue will be announced later.
ViacomCBS on Wednesday night announced Paramount Plus, a beefed-up streaming service it hopes will win coveted dollars in an increasingly crowded space. But even as the company hopes a burst of material could help it compete with rivals Peacock, HBO Max and Hulu, it must contend with another challenge: how to grab new streaming customers while not letting go of legacy dollars. It is, after all, that money that help pays for the service, which won’t be profitable for at least several years.
ViacomCBS spent the afternoon unveiling details about Paramount+, its rebranded streamer that will launch May 4, and now here is a roundup of the television series and feature films that will be available on the service. Paramount+ will feature a content catalog of more than 30,000 episodes, 2,500 movie titles and 1,000-plus live sporting events and news coverage. More than 50 new series across multiple genres will bow during the next two years on the streamer, which promises 7,000 episodes of kids content, 5,000 of reality and 6,000 of comedy.
60 Minutes+ will debut March 4 with three separate episodes, the network announced Wednesday. The announcement was part of a rollout for Paramount+, which is replacing the CBS All Access service, offering Paramount movies as well as old and new programming from CBS and the Viacom stable of networks. Above, Jonathan Blakely, is executive producer of the new show that CBS hopes CBS hopes will expose the durable brand to a younger and more diverse audience.
ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish Leaps Into Streaming
While Wednesday’s big presentation for investors was focused on Paramount+, Chairman Shari Redstone made it clear that ViacomCBS isn’t discounting its broadcast and cable businesses. “We’re about both linear and streaming,” she declared.
Epix and Paramount Pictures today announced an expansion of their relationship that includes an extension of their existing U.S. pay TV output deal on mutually beneficial terms. Under the new agreement, many of Paramount’s theatrically-released films will premiere earlier than before in pay TV on Epix.
ViacomCBS is reviving a streaming version of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes, hoping the series can draw viewers to its new online service Paramount+, according to people familiar with the situation. The company had created a spinoff of the show called 60 in 6 for the short-lived Quibi, but it was left in limbo when the streaming startup announced plans to close down in October.
The long-rumored Frasier revival could soon be a reality at Paramount Plus. Variety has confirmed with sources that a new iteration of Frasier is in discussions at the ViacomCBS streaming service, though those discussions are said to be in the very early stages.
That day is when the rebranded streaming service will go live in the U.S. and Latin America, with planned launches for the Nordics on March 25 and in Australia in mid-2021. Canada’s version of CBS All Access will also be rebranded to Paramount+ on March 4 and “an expanded offering will be available later in the year.”
CBS All Access is trading in CBS for Paramount. ViacomCBS revealed Tuesday that the rebranded streaming service will be called Paramount+ beginning early next year. The rebranding is the second, and much bigger, phase of the two-phase expansion of CBS All Access, which first launched in 2014 and was among the earliest entrants in the streaming space.
It makes the movie instantly profitable for the studio, Paramount, which avoids a (likely) theatrical misfire and costly marketing campaign.
The recently expanded board of the entertainment conglomerate has been convening daily since Monday to weigh major topics of the company’s future, including selling a minority stake in Paramount — with a path for the potential buyer to acquire all of the Hollywood studio at a later date — and the potential sale of all of Viacom, or a possible recombination of Viacom with CBS.
With Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman officially out, analysts are renewing calls for Viacom and CBS to recombine and for Viacom to sell off the struggling Paramount.
Viacom Inc.’s plan to sell a stake in its historic Hollywood movie studio, Paramount Pictures, suffered another setback Friday when the Redstone family publicly reaffirmed its opposition. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has reportedly been negotiating with Chinese entertainment giant Dalian Wanda Group over the studio.
21st First Century Fox is interested in acquiring a minority stake in Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, a source close to the situation said on Wednesday. The company would be interested in exploring a deal that would create synergies for Paramount but not in being a pure financial investor, according to the source.
Given the more generous subsidies offered in other states and countries, major studios including NBCUniversal, Paramount and Disney all have large-scale, long-term expansion plans.
Brad Grey, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures and a prominent former TV producer himself, is looking to build a new TV division to insulate the studio from the lagging film industry. Grey has begun meeting with candidates who could run the new TV studio, individuals close to the CEO say, reviving a business that Paramount successfully ran for decades until the end of 2005 when Viacom and CBS were split into two distinct companies.
Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman just teased the announcement which he says will be coming “shortly.” The studio’s initiative will be “very small,” beginning with “a project based on one of our film properties,” he said at the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet and Telecom conference.
NEW YORK (AP) — YouTube and Paramount Pictures have reached a deal to make nearly 500 films available to rent online, even while their parent companies continue to feud over […]
