For the first time since they split up in 2005—which was nearly 14 whole years ago!—Viacom and CBS have announced that they intend to merge together into a single company… again. This comes from The Verge, which says the new company will be branded ViacomCBS and that current Viacom CEO Bob Bakish will become the CEO of the new company, with The Wall Street Journal saying this new/old union will be valued at $30 billion. Naturally, this won’t all be official for a while, but the move was unanimously approved by both boards already.
The obvious justification for this is to make CBS and Viacom into a single big company that can more easily compete with all of those other big media companies, specifically Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, NBCUniversal, and WarnerMedia. CBS already has its CBS All Access streaming service and its library of content, but this merger will combine that with Viacom’s library of content (which includes its many networks like Showtime, MTV, BET, Comedy Central, and Showtime)—not to mention the fact that Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, which controls the Transformers, Star Trek, and Mission: Impossible movies.
All together, The Verge says ViacomCBS’ collection comes out to 140,000 TV episodes and 3,600 movies, which certainly sounds like a lot and should give the new-ish company some solid ground to stand on when it comes to competing against those other big players (probably with some kind of ViacomCBS streaming service). You wanted to subscribe to another new streaming service, right? Of course you did. Just shut up and take out your wallet.