Ahead of the launches of Disney+ and Apple TV+, ViacomCBS’ Shari Redstone is looking for more scale.
More than two months before CBS Corp and Viacom Inc succeeded at a third attempt to recombine, controlling shareholder Shari Redstone had already decided the new company needed to get bigger. “We would want to look at something after that to … develop more scale as we move forward,” Redstone said at The Information’s Women in Tech, Media and Finance conference in June… It was clear that her ambitions went well beyond the hard-won reunion of the two companies her father, Sumner Redstone, put together and then pulled apart 13 years ago during a very different era in media.
Even with the combined portfolio of companies that include the CBS television network, CBS News, Showtime cable network and book publisher Simon & Schuster with MTV, Paramount studios and Nickelodeon, the new company, which will be called ViacomCBS Inc, will lack the firepower required to take on the likes of Walt Disney Co and Netflix Inc, Redstone believed.
By next year, the battle waged by big tech and the last of the remaining media giants will get bloodier when Disney, AT&T Inc and Comcast’s NBCUniversal join Netflix, Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc in the streaming video war for consumer wallets.
MacDailyNews Take: Sony would be an interesting acquisition for ViacomCBS or other companies with streaming ambitions, not only for Sony’s library of titles, but also for PlayStation Vue which, despite being badly named (it’s not a gaming console), it’s easily our most-used app on Apple TV, with live local affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox plus many other “channels,” its well-thought-out cloud DVR, On Demand, and more. It has much potential, especially with a proper rename and some real marketing.