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Paramount Global, the home of streaming service Paramount+, lost its CEO Bob Bakish on Monday. He resigned and was replaced by controlling shareholder Shari Redstone with a newly formed “Office of the CEO” with three executives: George Cheeks, president and CEO of CBS; Chris McCarthy, president and CEO, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks; and Brian Robbins, president and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon.

After a few failed stabs at writing this essay since Sunday night, I have finally realized why Bakish’s departure has felt like a moving target to analyze. Part of the problem is that the news cycle that started with rumors he would be fired continued through Tuesday morning. But, I had not realized that he is the first C-Suite departure of the “streaming wars” era who is leaving because of an ill-conceived streaming strategy of their own (more below).

As I told Brandon Katz —then of The Observer, now at Parrot Analytics—back in 2021: 

“Sports plus breaking news plus kids plus Pluto is a business,” Rosen surmised. “Everything else they’re better off selling to Netflix.”

The point was that Paramount+’s “A Mountain of Entertainment” tagline—reflecting an exclusive library of content and originally reflected more than 2,300 movies and over 750 TV series—betrayed a weakness: The Paramount+ platform failed to offer customization and personalization like Netflix or YouTube. For that reason, its value proposition was, effectively, “Find Your Favorite Needle In a Haystack”.  That made its ambitions to compete with Netflix dead on arrival.

Three years later, that problem persists on Paramount+, which at 71 million subscribers reaches only 26% of Netflix’s current subscriber base. As Deloitte wrote in its 18th annual Digital Media Trends Report for 2024, U.S. consumers “may not be willing to give up the degree of customization they gained from unbundling pay TV, or the personalization they enjoy from social media.” That mistake lies with Bakish, but it ultimately falls at the feet of Shari Redstone, who pushed for the merger of CBS and Viacom over the protests of shareholders five years ago. Her rationale—similar to Disney CEO Robert Iger's decision to acquire the film and TV assets of 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion—was that a bigger company with a bigger library could compete with Netflix.

With Bakish out the door and Redstone rumored to be open to selling Paramount’s controlling shareholder National Amusements to someone other than Skydance, the next owner of Paramount has the opportunity to restart with a retail-first, consumer-first strategy.

What should that owner do?

Key Takeaway

Shari Redstone's preference to keep Paramount intact is right in the sense that “Today’s problems will not be solved tomorrow nor anytime soon.” But, with CEO Bob Bakish gone, a unique opportunity has emerged.

Total words: 2,100

Total time reading: 8 minutes