Business

Paramount Global says Chris McMarthy is the company’s “interim principal executive officer,” a necessity required by the SEC that apparently does not signal he has more decision-making power among a trio of top executives who stepped up to replace Bob Bakish this week in a new Office of the CEO. Security & Exchange Commission rules require a person, not an office, to conduct with over the normal course of business. It’s not clear why McCarthy, president and CEO, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, received the designation as opposed to George Cheeks or Brian Roberts.

Wall Street rallied Friday after hiring showed welcome signs of cooling.

After months of M&A talks, Paramount Global and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone might be going it alone after all. Insiders tell Variety that the expectation at the company is that neither of the two offers in play — Skydance Media-RedBird Capital Partners and Sony Pictures Entertainment-Apollo Global Management — will come to fruition. And Redstone is said to have reluctantly concluded that a deal with David Ellison’s Skydance, a longtime partner of Paramount Pictures, will not be possible.

The sports streaming platform FuboTV — which is battling to stop a rival Disney, Warners and Fox sports streaming joint venture in the works — reported it ended the first quarter with 1.51 million paid subscribers in North America, down from 1.61 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2023.

Giant media buyer Publicis is telling network sales executives that it does not think Nielsen’s new panel-plus-big-data currency is ready for this upfront. Publicis will stick with Nielsen, using the measurement company’s traditional panel-based ratings. The media buyer is eager to use Nielsen’s big data product when it meets its standards, according to people involved in preliminary upfront discussions.

It was a year of pain for the entertainment industry and shareholders of (many) media companies with months-long Hollywood strikes and layoffs. Linear television continued to decline and a nascent theatrical recovery went sideways. However, most CEOs saw pay packages rise in 2023, some by big multiples.

Just days after Bob Bakish left Paramount Global as CEO, CBS President-CEO George Cheeks — one-third of the newly formed “Office of the CEO” that will now jointly run the company — spoke to reporters about what to expect moving forward. And so far, there’s not much he can say.

Allen Media Group, the owner of the linear TV Weather Channel, will cut employees across the company. “Allen Media Group is making strategic changes to better position the company for growth that will result in expense and workforce reductions across all divisions of the company,” a rep for Allen Media said on Thursday. No details on the size of the workforce reduction were disclosed.

Kantar has released a new study showing the U.S. streaming market has hit a saturation point, with the household penetration rate stagnating and at near universal levels. Streaming services were available in 95% of, or 123 million, U.S. households, growing only 0.1% quarter-on-quarter, according to Kantar’s latest Entertainment on Demand (EoD) data on the US streaming market from January to March 2024. The study found, however, that the average number of paid services accessed per household continues to rise, with U.S. households now subscribing to 3.9 paid services on average.

Despite an impending challenge from Meta’s end to its Authorized Sales Partner program, Entravision Communications reported a strong financial performance for the first quarter of 2024. With net revenue rising 16% to $277.45 million, the company finished ahead of analyst expectations, but Entravision faced rising costs across the board, including a significant $49.44 million impairment charge. These escalated expenses contributed to a net loss of $48.89 million for the quarter, a stark contrast to the net income of $2.04 million reported in Q1 2023.

Apple‘s fiscal Q2 numbers beat Wall Street estimates on the top and bottom line in a market that was waiting for them with some trepidation — mainly news of iPhone sales in China. The dip there was less than anticipated. The stock is up more than 7% in after-hours trading. Apple shares had a huge 2023 but the stock has been nearly alone among the so-called Magnificent Seven tech stocks to lose ground so far in 2024.

Wall Street climbed Thursday to trim its loss for the week. Earnings reports from several big companies helped drive the market higher.

From a studio space in Chelsea, Spotify hosted its first-ever NewFronts event on Wednesday. Discussing a steep rise in consumers’ video consumption, Spotify’s Head of Sales Ann Piper and Global Creative Director Kay Hsu highlighted new advertising opportunities in digital video on the platform. Spotify is focused on becoming a more “immersive” platform. It has already tackled “utility” and “curation” in previous years, according to the presentation with slides by Hsu.

The offer comes as the exclusive negotiating window between Skydance and the entertainment giant is about to expire.

DirecTV, Dish Network and Newsmax also joined the call for hearings in Washington, D.C. into the future of pay TV competition and its impact on consumers.

SAG-AFTRA has enlisted Nielsen to cross-check the streaming data the union will be receiving from the Hollywood studios as part of the historic new deal struck in 2023, which provides bonuses based on streaming performance of movies and shows. The union said in a statement that in Nielsen, it will have “an objective source of domestic viewership data for original streaming programming” to compliment the performance numbers provided by the studios.

Broitman, Katz chief operating officer since 2012, takes over on July 1.

The good news — or bad news, depending on how you look at it — is that consumer time spent with media continues to expand. The really bad news for the ad industry is that ad-supported media’s share continues to decline, in both the U.S. and worldwide. Those are among the findings in the 2024 edition of an annual Global Consumer Media Usage Forecast by PQ Media. While total weekly time spent with media actually declined 0.4% to 76.69 hours in the U.S., and inched up only 0.3% to 56.15 hours worldwide, PQ forecasts it will rebound again this year and continue expanding for the foreseeable future.

Estrella MediaCo. said it is expanding its connected TV portfolio by launching three new channels with Curiosity that will first appear on Samsung TV Plus. The three free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels, Curiosity Español. Curiosity Animales and Curiosity Motores, were announced at Estrella’s NewFront presentation Wednesday. Estrella also said it would be putting Hallmark Channel content in Spanish on its app and linear channels, as well as 300 hours of content from Hemisphere on the EstrellaTV app, which is being refreshed this month.

Wall Street ended Wednesday mixed after the Fed kept interest rates high and downplayed the odds of a hike.

Diamond’s against-all-odds escape from bankruptcy liquidation hits a major snag after its Bally Sports carriage deal with Comcast expires and the two sides fail to agree on another temporary extension.

Starting Sept. 1, WGN Chicago; WVBT Norfolk, Va.; and KLFY Lafayette La., will carry CW’s primetime entertainment, live sports, and special event programming.

David Zaslav famously said in 2022 that Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t “have to have the NBA.” It appears Wall Street disagrees. WBD’s already rock-bottom stock price plummeted nearly 10% on Tuesday after a report in The Wall Street Journal signaled the media conglomerate could be in for an expensive battle to maintain its NBA broadcast rights, with shares ending Tuesday at $7.36. That figure represents an all-time low for WBD, the parent company of CNN.