Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
Paramount Plus celebrated its first birthday yesterday. During its first year, the service debuted a SpongeBob movie, added original shows like 1883, and occasionally surprised us with exclusives like the second season of Evil, which was originally a CBS exclusive show. Plus, Paramount Plus managed to swipe the highly anticipated live-action Halo series â set to debut this month â from sister service Showtime.
But a year after its launch, Paramount Plus is still suffering an identity crisis: the streaming service has yet to prove why we should care about Paramount Plus beyond its big Star Trek catalog and obsession with Yellowstone. So far, itâs seemed as though Paramount has struggled to find the sweet spot between propping up its existing business arms while also investing in its tentpole streaming service.
âI think theyâre afraid to make hard choices. Thatâs the thing that sticks with me,â Andrew A. Rosen, PARQOR founder and a former Viacom digital media executive, tells The Verge. âThereâs basic questions that are not unreasonable to ask that they donât have answers for.â
Many of those questions pertain to Paramount Plusâ thus-far unusual content strategy â a kind of anti-Netflix approach. When the service rebranded from CBS All Access in March of 2021, it promised to serve up a âmountain of contentâ that brought all of Paramountâs assets under a single roof. Live sports, live news and entertainment, and a backlog of programming â from BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, and the Smithsonian Channel â promised to give ostensible âfansâ of CBS All Access even more to watch while also appealing to a wider audience.
The problem is that some of the content owned by Paramount (nĂ©e ViacomCBS) that should have driven viewers to the service hasnât been available to stream there. South Park, for example, currently lives on HBO Max after the streamer won a bidding war for the series just over two years ago. Another popular Paramount title, Yellowstone, currently premieres new episodes on the Paramount Network cable channel and, confoundingly, Peacock.
Tanya Giles, chief programming officer of streaming at Paramount, recently explained the Yellowstone issue at least. She told Deadline that then-ViacomCBS âhad content licensing deals well before [Paramount Plus] was thought of and our solution to that, our great solution, was to create a broad universe of Yellowstone by bringing 1883, its prequel, exclusively to [Paramount Plus].â Its licensing business no doubt generated short-term gains, but it doesnât jibe well with a long-play streaming strategy.
That leaves Paramount Plus in a bind. Itâs had a couple of grabby names to date, like Star Trek and SpongeBob spinoffs. But up against services like Disney Plus and Netflix that debut a ton of new originals regularly and are dumpling billions into content for their platforms, the question becomes: Where are Paramount Plusâs other flashy originals? Where is its Strangers Things or WandaVision?
âAcross the entire board, they have one of the best libraries,â says Julia Alexander, a senior strategy analyst at Parrot Analytics and former reporter at The Verge. âThe issue is they have no high-acquisition title. All their high-acquisition titles are elsewhere.â
Paramount Plus has decadesâ worth of crime procedurals, comedy, and kidsâ programming â all of which is quite good â but Paramount Plus has yet to have its very own Stranger Things moment, which could help it position itself as a streaming competitor in earnest. Alexander adds that even with that great back catalog of franchise programming, in order to stay competitive, Paramount Plus needs to take the chance another of its shows can be the next Yellowstone and therefore must live on Paramount Plus to bring new subscribers in.
To its credit, the company does seem to realize that the content and licensing strategies it had in place when ViacomCBS launched Paramount Plus a year ago are no longer going to work if it wants to operate a successful streaming business. The company underwent a major executive restructure last summer, and Paramount boss Bob Bakish said during a recent earnings event that the company plans to claw back some of its older titles, including South Park, in the coming years â signaling that Paramount does, at least immediately, plan to stay competitive in the streaming space.
At the same time, Paramount is starting to fix its flashy content problem. The service will debut a number of highly anticipated titles this month, including Star Trek: Picard and Halo; it also recently teased upcoming projects from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. And the company last fall introduced a bundle with Showtime, which at $12 per month for essential and $15 per month for premium, is a hell of a steal for two premium services that usually cost between $5 and $11 per month, respectively.
Some of this will take time. South Park wonât be on the service until 2025, and satiating the appetite for even more Yellowstone projects will take a minute. Until then, the service will have to get by on the strength of its back catalog and the occasional big name.
âThey havenât built a Netflix competitor, but they built something thatâs useful to fans of different types of content of theirs worldwide â and they have real audiences worldwide,â Rosen says. âTo claim that theyâve failed is a bit rough. But at the same time, to claim that theyâve got a competitor to Netflix is also a bit of an overstatement.â
Paramount Plus is growing. The service reported 32.8 million subscribers on its most recent earnings call. (Disney Plus, which launched in 2019, had around 73 million paid subscribers in its first year.) Alexander also says itâs too early to write Paramount Plus off, adding that it could take anywhere from six to eight months to see the effects of Paramountâs evolving business strategy
âI think itâs too early to discount Paramount Plus in the way itâs too early to discount any of them,â Alexander says. âTheyâre all still trying to figure it out.â
Even with a shoddy content strategy straight out of the gate, Paramount Plus has shown it does have value in the streaming space. It just has to prove to us that itâs worth sticking around for.