ViacomCBS isn’t going quietly into the night after the latest battle in the streaming wars ended with WarnerMedia and Discovery merging their assets.
Paramount+ is Viacom’s main streaming asset competing against giants like Netflix and Disney+. The ace in the hole for ViacomCBS moving forward is their global soccer footprint. Paramount+ is the U.S home for the UEFA Champions League and Europa League, along with airing the NFL, Masters, PGA Tour, NCAA, NWSL, and SEC.
This wide sports offering gives the “underdog” a fighting chance to compete in a cutthroat streaming market. ViacomCBS Streaming president and CEO Tom Ryan told Yahoo! that his company is “extremely well-positioned in the streaming category.”
“What matters in streaming is that you’ve got a [wide range] of content,” Ryan said in the interview. “Strong brands and ubiquitous distribution. And, through the combination of ViacomCBS, we have all of those. We see the streaming space evolving very quickly into a space that mirrors in some ways the evolution of traditional TV.”
The range of Discovery’s content pool is growing exponentially if the WarnerMedia merger goes through unscathed. Yet, Viacom’s CFO Naveen Chopra is undeterred.
“The transaction itself doesn’t change anything about our strategy,” Chopra said about the merger recently at a JPMorgan conference. “We’ve been very focused on transitioning our assets to help drive streaming.”
Driving streaming is what Discovery plans to do with their new stock of assets. They committed to spend $20 billion on content per year within the new WarnerMedia deal. That is the most money devoted to content of any service — including Netflix, which plans to spend $17 billion a year.
Viacom has raised funding as well recently. Ryan said the company “recently raised nearly $3 billion” to help continue their push in the streaming wars on a global scale.