It’s the End of Paramount+ As We’ve Known It (and That’s Fine)

For many months now, Hollywood insiders and industry commentators have been talking about Paramount+ — at least the service as it currently exists — as a dead streamer walking. This week, however, the obituary notices started coming from within the building.

During a shareholder presentation Tuesday, the three execs currently running Paramount Global (at least for now; the company may be on the verge of being sold) announced that they had a plan to “transform” the company’s streaming strategy, which currently focuses on the stand-alone streamer Paramount+ (and, to a lesser degree, free streamer Pluto TV). Toward this end, the trio said they had begun actively exploring the formation of a joint venture with either a rival streamer or a tech company — and that they’d already received interest from possible partners. While they didn’t go into any details of what such a joint venture would entail, both history and common sense suggest an outcome where Paramount+ either becomes a tile on another service, or its content gets folded into a new or existing platform featuring content from multiple companies, similar to how Hulu at one time existed as a partnership among ABC, NBC, and Fox’s corporate owners.

The execs went out of their way to stress that they’re not thinking small here. “Let me clear: I’m not talking about marketing bundles,” like the one Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are planning, said Chris McCarthy, president/CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, and part of Par’s three-headed exec branch. Instead, the company is looking to form “a deep and expansive relationship, one that would make the most of our hit content while improving the customer offering.” McCarthy said Par wants a new paradigm that both reduces subscriber churn and, perhaps most importantly, controls cost.

It’s not that Par execs think their programming isn’t popular enough to work in a subscription universe. Quite the opposite: The exec trio talked up the populist appeal of its content and noted Paramount+’s ability to become a top-five streamer just a couple of years after launch, with over 70 million global subscribers. But Paramount has decided the costs of running its own streaming service — marketing dozens of shows, finding a user interface that actually works, etc. — are too high. Instead, it wants to create a new blueprint where Paramount content (CBS shows, MTV reality series, the Yellowstone universe, Paramount Pictures movies) has a guaranteed home, but not in an expensive, self-contained luxury island where Par shareholders pay the full mortgage. Think of it this way: Paramount wants to move its streaming offering from the ritzy mountaintop mansion where it’s lived the past few years and relocate it to a still very nice duplex condo where another owner (or owners) helps pay for building upkeep.

To underscore just how serious they were about moving on from the current Paramount+ status quo, McCarthy said the company has “already had a great deal of an inbound interest” in the idea and that there would be more details “soon.” It’s worth noting here that back in February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount had engaged in conversations with Peacock owner Comcast about a Peacock–Paramount+ merger “through a partnership or joint venture” — the exact same wording McCarthy used this week. The paper has also reported Warner Bros. Discovery’s interest in a team-up. Nothing has happened publicly on this front, in part because of the aforementioned potential sale to David Ellison’s Skydance Media, producer (with Par) of the recent Mission: Impossible and Top Gun movies and TV shows like Reacher and Jack Ryan. Per multiple published reports, the Skydance-Paramount deal is both all but done and possibly in doubt, given some supposed last-minute doubts from Shari Redstone, the media mogul who basically controls Paramount through her family’s movie-theater chain National Amusements.

It’s this uncertainty that may explain why Tuesday’s admission by Paramount’s current leadership that Paramount+ as a stand-alone business no longer makes sense hasn’t generated a ton of headlines. Fact is, as long as there’s a strong chance that new ownership could be taking over, any plans from the current “office of the CEO” of Paramount Global come with a major asterisk attached. It’s hard to imagine any potential Paramount+ partner would sign a deal without knowing for sure that either the people executing said deal will be around to see it through or that the new owners are onboard with the idea. And then there’s this: Many in the media and Wall Street have been operating under the assumption that Paramount+ as it is now isn’t long for this world, and that any new owner, including Skydance, would look to make a meaningful change in streaming. (In fact, I continue to hear rumblings from very good sources that a Peacock–Paramount+ team-up of some sort is more likely than not, however the current ownership drama gets resolved.) So the fact that the current management officially signed on shaking things up might not read as worthy of a breaking-news alert.

But if Redstone’s supposed waffling ends with the Skydance bid being called off and Paramount Global moving forward with one or all of its current leaders, then this week will go down as a very important milestone in the streaming wars. Five years after Apple and Disney officially kicked off hostilities versus Netflix in the race to win SVOD share, a major combatant could be getting ready to sue for peace.