“We have long believed that the initial separation of these companies made zero sense,” media analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in a recent report. “Even though Viacom and CBS will be a larger company, it will still have to compete with Disney, which is in a league of its own,” said Jordan Matthews, an entertainment lawyer with Weinberg Gonser in Los Angeles. Viacom shares closed at $29.21, up 2.4% while CBS shares rose 1.3% to $48.70. Another lawsuit connected to the 2019 merger of CBS and Viacom has been settled. Working together may ensure both companies are better off than they started, but holding out against each other may be the best-case scenario for one company and the worst-case scenario for the other.

The merger comes at a time when upheaval in the traditional pay-TV market and the rise of digital streaming services have changed the economics of the entertainment industry and pressured media companies to either grow or sell themselves off. With streaming video companies like Netflix now the leading story, CBS and Viacom are fusing their war chests to better compete in the rapidly morphing world of TV and film watching. Ianniello, 51, will remain in charge of the CBS properties, which include the broadcast network, production studios, a chain of television stations, the streaming service CBS All Access, CBS Films, Showtime Networks and the Simon & Schuster book publishing house.

Affected assets

The $30 billion “controlled transaction” created ViacomCBS, Inc. – the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire that owns well-known television brands such as Paramount, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Showtime– which was later renamed Paramount Global. Viacom’s stock performance was not to his liking and he saw few if any transformative acquisition properties on the horizon. So he proposed breaking Viacom into two companies, housing movie and cable-TV operations in a company https://forexhero.info/top-8-python-libraries-for-natural-language/ led by Freston and broadcast TV, radio and outdoor advertising operations under Moonves. Freston’s Viacom was supposed to grow more quickly without being encumbered by the more stable businesses given to Moonves. “Sometimes, divorce is better than marriage,” Redstone quipped in an interview at the time. The challenge for Bakish and Redstone this time around is to make ViacomCBS function as an integrated company — something that did not happen during the first merger.

In the corporate boardroom, the Viacom/CBS merger also led to more executive intrigue, as Moonves continued to amass more power and Redstone rather quickly soured on Karmazin. But the enlarged ViacomCBS will emerge to do battle in a much more treacherous competitive landscape than they faced two decades ago. Even in bolting the companies together, there are questions about whether ViacomCBS is big enough to do battle with the tech giants that are up-ending traditional media and entertainment. Disney’s market valuation is nearly $250 billion, slightly less than AT&T’s.

Paramount to Receive $167.5M to Settle Shareholder Suit Tied to CBS-Viacom Merger

“Effective February 16, we’ll be bringing together our leading portfolio of premium entertainment properties under a new parent company name,” the company said. ViacomCBS announced Tuesday that the company will become known as Paramount. But the combined company will still be far smaller than many of the media titans that it will need to compete with. Once the news of the change was announced, Google Trends reported a spike in searches for the phrase “did Paramount buy CBS.” The previous board of directors of Viacom were George S. Abrams, David Andelman, Joseph Califano, Jr., William Cohen, Philippe Dauman, Alan C. Greenberg, Charles Phillips, Shari Redstone, Sumner Redstone, Frederic Salerno, William Schwartz, and Robert D. Walter.

Under CBS Corporation, the larger of the two companies, are the CBS broadcast network, local TV stations, the premium pay-TV channel Showtime, Network Ten in Australia, 50 percent of the CW Network with WarnerMedia, and the book publisher Simon & Schuster. Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, a variety of cable TV channels including as MTV and Comedy Central, Channel Five TV in the U.K., and Argentina’s Telefe TV network. CBS Corp. and Viacom, once part of the same company, plan to again join forces in a merger to bolster their positions in a rapidly changing entertainment industry that’s pushing other media giants to consolidate their digital content for the streaming age. CBS Corp. is buying Viacom in an all-stock transaction that values Viacom at its current stock market capitalization of around $12 billion, the companies announced Tuesday.

CBS And Viacom Complete Merger

On February 7, 2020, Vice Chancellor Joseph R. Slights III appointed the California Public Employees’ Retirement System to represent shareholders as lead plaintiff and Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann as lead counsel. On Tuesday, the media companies CBS and Viacom finally announced that they are merging. It’s the move their owner Shari Redstone has been trying to make for years.

Under the deal’s terms, Viacom shareholders would receive about a 0.6 share of CBS stock in exchange for 1 share of Viacom stock. The Redstones’ National Amusements would retain control of the combined ViacomCBS through its ownership of Class A voting shares that currently represent nearly 80% of the shareholder votes at both companies. Indeed, the merger process was able to close quickly because the Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal regulators already considered Viacom and CBS to be under the same roof.