Today in "Reinventing Cable": Paramount+ and Peacock in talks for joint venture

For some time now, we’ve been tracking how long it would take the streaming giants to become regular old TV again. It’s already started to happen: adding ad tiers, windowing content to other services, bundling different apps. The truth of the matter is that the old mode of television is profitable, and the new mode kind of isn’t. That’s how we go from every major studio scrambling to make their own individual streaming service to Paramount+ and Peacock potentially combining into one.

This news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said Paramount Global had talks with Comcast about “joining forces in streaming through a partnership or joint venture.” Nothing is set in stone yet, but a partnership “could produce significant cost savings—from spending on programming to marketing—and create a more in-depth offering for consumers, especially with regard to live sports,” writes WSJ.

Paramount has clearly been selling itself around town; last year, it was briefly rumored that the company might merge with Warner Bros. Discovery. Variety says Comcast is unlikely to do a full merge with Paramount, but there are a few other M&A (merger and acquisition) scenarios floating around. As far as streaming goes, despite being home to the extremely popular Tyler Sheridan universe of shows, Paramount+ is still hemorrhaging money: in 2023, the platform reportedly narrowed its losses from the year before… but still lost $238 million (per Deadline).

Reducing the number of individual streaming services and having more content in one place is an answer (if not the answer) to the essential problem of streaming. Hell, that’s why Netflix succeeded in the first place—because it had a wide variety of other studios’ stuff, online and easily accessible. Because it invented and perfected the form, Netflix is so far the only streaming service to turn a profit. And even its most popular show is an old procedural somebody else made!

Multiple studios coming together under one app may give them more of a fighting chance to compete with Netflix’s major head start, but it’s not the first time this has been attempted, either: Hulu was once a joint venture between Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, and Comcast. Over the years those companies consolidated or peeled off, and in 2019 Comcast stepped back from Hulu… to focus on launching Peacock. Disney acquired the controlling shares of Hulu to bundle it with its other streaming service, Disney+, and now apparently Peacock is in the market to reinvent Hulu with a new partner this time.

Or should we say reinvent cable: all these major moves the streamers have made are just an echo of television’s past. The promise of “cutting the cord” has only amounted to viewers getting tied up in new, different fees. Netflix, which originated and championed a new way to watch TV, experienced its first subscriber loss in 2022 and had to introduce ads. In the classic pattern of Silicon Valley innovation, the streaming model disrupted a system that worked, created something unsustainable, and now has to sell us back what we had before, but worse. Sure, why not, make Peacock and Paramount+ one weird app. It may benefit everybody in the short term, but will we ever be able to fix what streaming broke?