ViacomCBS Rebrands To Paramount & Commits To Streaming

ViacomCBS executives announced that as of February 16 the media conglomerate is officially known as Paramount, and it will be pivoting fully to streaming pinned up by a huge library of IP.

The company was formed when the two massive legacy media companies, CBS and Viacom, merged back in December 2019. Paramount chair Shari Redstone, and the company’s President and CEO Bob Bakish, first informed staffers of the change in a memo Tuesday. The memo to staff was also paired with a bombastic presentation to investors, which featured Redstone and Bakish entering from a sports car to the stage at New York’s Kaufman Astoria Studios.

Along with the name change announcement that led the presentation, executives touted plans to expand their content library from their many brands to go all-in on the company’s streaming services, namely Paramount Plus and Showtime. Paramount will reportedly hope to reach 100 million streaming customers by 2024, which is up from the 65 to 75 million they initially predicted. They stand at around 56 million subscribers between all their services.

The reboot bug will be hitting Paramount hard, which is a sensible move given the amount of IP it’s sitting on. Representatives from content divisions of the company touted a huge number of franchises in their archive. They are beefing up reboots of kids’ franchises like Paw Patrol and Sonic the Hedgehog, a third movie of which was announced before the second premieres. They’re also continuing Mission Impossible, and even renewed the upcoming Halo series for a second season before its debut. Some originals were also previewed, but the focus was more on existing material by far.

The transition hasn’t been an entirely smooth one, and investors’ hesitation around a full-on commitment to streaming was reflected by Paramount’s stock price falling by 21% on Wednesday. While the corp has its sights set for huge profits down the road, investing in that huge breadth of content also caused losses at the end of 2021 after earnings were weaker than expected.

It remains to be seen whether Paramount will stake enough of a claim in the streaming wars with this much spending, which capped off at $2.1 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow as this arsenal of new material begins to enter production. The figures are impressive, but companies like Disney and Netflix will run laps around that spending with estimated 2022 content budgets of around $23 billion and $17 billion respectively.