Streaming Wars: Paramount Plus Gaining on Disney+

Paramount has been on a major spending spree lately and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure where they were getting the money from. They have been in last place and cash strapped for years now. And the simple reason they have spending money again, is that they are gaining subscriptions fast. The last time I checked in was months ago when CBS-All Access had failed and they only had a few million subs, these had to mostly be ride-or-die Big Bang Theory fans because it sure as hell wasn’t Star Trek.

But Paramount is closing in fast on 50 million subscriptions when means they are officially in the game. Now half of their streamers are watching old Nickelodeon content. Spongebob, Rugrats, and Barnyard, mostly kid’s stuff. But what really got those subs rolling in was the South Park: Post Covid. A show that has left Hawkeye so far in the dust, the dust had not only settled but was being cultivated for spring planting by the time Hawkeye even knew it was in a race.

Hawkeye had about 60% of Loki’s opening numbers. This is a very bad thing for Disney Plus. Marvel is failing and failing badly. Kevin Feige’s plan to replace all of the white male heroes with women of whatever color is obvious to everyone by this point. The Marvel brand is now damaged but there has not yet been a The Last Jedi, black swan event that shatters the fan base irreparably. I’m sure it’s coming eventually.

In other streaming news, there have been anti-trust concerns raised by the merger of Discovery and Warner Brothers.

This is on the face of it, laughable. In no way, shape or form could this merger result in anything that remotely resembles a monopoly. It was Senators like Elizabeth Warren that were announcing their deep and troubling concerns about what this merger could mean.

Here is what is really going on with that.

In 1996 Ted Turner brokered a merger of his cable empire and Time Warner. Five years later he got screwed and booted out of Time Warner when it merged with AOL (remember that disaster?). Warner has owned CNN ever since. In the ensuing 25 years, CNN went from a small but steady cash cow to an inescapable money pit. This was made worse when AT&T bought up Warner and some overly optimistic contracts were signed with some of CNN’s high profile “talent.” Despite the fact that it was already losing money.

The new CEO of Warner Brothers/Discovery had looked for a buyer for CNN but quickly concluded that this was a hopeless quest, so his plan was to dump as much of Warner Brothers/Discovery’s debt onto CNN as possible and spin it off. CNN would likely die in a year or two but that wasn’t his problem.

Until Elizabeth decided it was.

This nakedly acknowledges that CNN is no longer a news service but is the official propaganda organ of the Democratic Party.

Warner has now publically stated they will continue to run CNN, (apparently as a corporate charity). While it would have been fun to watch it go under there are YouTube channels that reliably get more views than CNN.

Rightfully so, (try to ignore the ear-expanders)

Her Diagon Ally is even better.