There are three media companies that own a movie and a TV studio, a streamer and a substantial number of cable channels: NBCUniversal, Warner Discovery and Paramount. The first two are both in the process of spinning off the majority — or all — of their ad-supported cable assets into new companies ready for private equity play. Do not expect Paramount to follow them under its new ownership following the acquisition by Skydance, the company’s leadership stressed at a press event on Wednesday in Los Angeles.
“There’s no question it’s super challenging business,” said George Cheeks, Paramount’s Chair of TV Media division which encompasses all linear networks, CBS as well as Paramount Media Networks’ MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and BET, among others. “But, the cable group, the content group, has created these incredibly iconic franchises, and we’re all seeing the pay cable business shifting over to streaming. So there’ll be a lot of conversations about what iconic franchises we want to continue, shift maybe to streaming, etc. We’re seven days in, but I do feel like there’s a lot to preserve there. There’s a lot of great, iconic franchises.”
Following up on that, Paramount President Jeff Shell, who later gave thumbs-up to his former company NBCUniversal’s decision to spin their cable assets into Versant, explained why Paramount won’t be doing that.
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“Our cable portfolio is a little bit different than some of the other companies that are spinning and doing that stuff,” he said. “We have less of our economics of the company on cable because they decline so much. But the brands are much more defined, as George said. You look at a brand like BET, which is a pretty strong brand that’s going to be a pretty important building block of our of our streaming strategy. So we’re thinking about the cable networks not as declining linear assets that we need to spin off or deal with somehow. We’re thinking of them as brands that we have to redefine.”
Paramount COO Andy Gordon added Nickelodeon to the list, stressing that “kids and family is so important to the world, and making sure that we’re doing the right thing for Nick and that whole cadre of the content is critically important to us as well,” while Cindy Holland, Chair of Direct-to-Consumer, gave South Park as “a great example” of show which, 27 seasons in, continues to debut on cable network Comedy Central before moving to streaming, currently on Paramount+ globally.
Going back to Cheeks’ comment about “iconic [cable] franchises we want to continue, shift maybe to streaming,” South Park would be perfectly suited for such a shift given its popularity on streaming where it keeps reaching new generations of fans. (It explains the $1.5B fee the show just landed for a five-year Paramount+ deal.)
Underlined the cultural relevancy of the Paramount cable brands, Shell later noted that he had received more calls about MTV than anything else since he started working with Skydance and its CEO David Ellison on the Paramount acquisition months ago.
After Shell called BET “a pretty important building block of our of our streaming strategy,” Ellison confirmed that the network, which, along with VH1, BET Studios and BET+ had been shopped multiple times over the past several years, is not going anywhere as Ellison plans to keep the promise he gave Shari Redstone awhile back.
“We had this conversation with Shari when we had our first meeting actually about the company that our intention is to keep the company together and invest through the lines of a long-term commitment,” he said.
While the immediate goal is to get Paramount’s three streaming services, Paramount+, Pluto TV and BET+ onto a single tech stack to improve efficiency, the integration could go further than that, Ellison told Deadline, with BET+ eventually becoming a tile on Paramount+ a possibility.
As the Paramount executives also stressed at a similar press event in New York last week, the goal will be to “reimagine” the company’s cable brands, though that is not one of the Top 3 priorities for Paramount right off the bat, according to Shell. Those Day 1 priorities include rebuilding the Paramount content machine beyond CBS and Taylor Sheridan that he gave as examples of things that work really well — with the $7.7B UFC deal and Paramount Pictures’ aggressive bid for the James Mangold & Timothée Chalamet package High Side being part of that — as well as getting the cost cuts done and scaling up Paramount+.