Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
Paramount isn’t planning to join fellow media giants Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery in spinning off its cable assets. On the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday, Paramount president Jeff Shell acknowledged the continued decline in cable viewership (and thus subscriber and advertising revenue), but he said the company plans to take a different approach in managing those assets. “Cable continues to decline, for us and for everybody,” Shell said on the call. “It’s increasingly clear that streaming has become the replacement” for traditional multi-channel bundles. Paramount also has some of the more recognizable cable brands under its roof, however, including Nickelodeon, MTV, BET and Comedy Central. Shell said Paramount will look at “taking those brands and seeing what we can do as far as driving value.” What that won’t include is spinning off Paramount’s cable portfolio into a standalone company, a la Comcast and Versant and WBD’s planned spinoff of its Discovery networks. “We’re not going to spin,” Shell said Tuesday. “We’re going to drive value [with the cable assets] but do it within the company.” That will involve using the well-established brands — Nickelodeon for kids and family programming, MTV for music and youth culture — and use them to help grow Paramount’s streaming business, one of the company’s “north stars,” as Shell and CEO David Ellison repeatedly referred to the key goals on the earnings call. That’s evident in things like Paramount’s recent deal with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which among other things made Paramount+ the exclusive worldwide streaming home of the show’s library (it had been at HBO Max in the United States). “We’re going to see if we can transform these brands,” Shell said, “and make them pieces of our scaled, global streaming business.”
