The deal brings Viacom’s Paramount Pictures and cable channels such as MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET together with the CBS broadcast network, Showtime, 28 O&O TV stations, CBS All Access and Simon & Schuster. The combined company, lead by Viacom CEO Bob Bakish, will have annual revenue of about $28 billion.
Bob Bakish |
Building on an extraordinary collection of culture-defining franchises and partnerships with creative talent around the world, ViacomCBS will be home to more than 140,000 premium TV episodes and 3,600 film titles, with global production capabilities and more than $13 billion in annual content investment. The company will account for 22% of TV viewership in the U.S. and hold the highest share of broadcast and cable viewing across key audience demographics, with strength in all categories, including News, Sports, General Entertainment, Pop Culture, Comedy, Music and Kids.
Through the strength and scale of these assets, ViacomCBS will be well-equipped to maximize the value of its content for its own platforms and for others, as it meets the growing global demand for third-party premium content. The company’s content scale will support a robust streaming strategy, including ViacomCBS’s own suite of advertising and subscription-based offerings. In addition, the company’s broad reach, extensive intellectual property portfolio and expertise in advanced marketing solutions will enable it to strengthen its partnerships with distributors and advertisers globally.
ViacomCBS Class A and Class B shares will begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on December 5, 2019 under the ticker symbols “VIACA” and “VIAC”, respectively.
Shari Redstone will serve as chairman of ViacomCBS. Variety reports that’s a capstone on her three-year quest to reshape her family’s media holdings after years of executive rivalries, fiefdoms and executive largess at the companies that are less vulnerable to shareholder pressure on performance because of National Amusements Inc’s iron grip on about 80% of voting shares in both firms. Indeed, the merger process was able to close quickly because the Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal regulators already considered Viacom and CBS to be under the same roof.
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