GRTV News - Paramount has shut down its entire TV department

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of GRTV News, today we're going to be talking about more cost cutting. It seems to be the theme of the last couple of years really actually, I think post-pandemic more so than anything, that major sort of entertainment companies across all sort of different avenues of the entertainment space, video games, movies, television, whatever, they're all going through this phase of cutting costs, reducing costs, and I think it's because they kind of boomed during the pandemic when everyone had a lot of extra time on their hands and was consuming extortionate amounts of entertainment, and now as things get back to normal, things have been back to normal for years now, but I think that we're finally seeing the financial repercussions of that return to normality. It takes a lot of time for finances to sort of shift in this direction, but the point is that we're seeing various major production companies that are known for their positions in movies and television have to make serious cost cuts and major sort of financial decisions. One at the moment is Warner Brothers Discovery, which is looking at various ways to save lots of money, including potentially selling off its video game studios, but another one is Paramount. Now Paramount looked, it seemed like they were doing alright, but clearly not the case because of this next cost-cutting measure that they have announced and put into effect, so let's take a look at it. So yeah, Paramount axes its television department as part of half a billion dollar cost-cutting measure, with thousands of employees expected to be laid off. So, you know, while the video game industry has felt pretty dire as of late, with the sheer number of studios that have been shut down, the tens of thousands of folk that have lost their jobs over the past couple of years, truthfully, this isn't an issue plaguing just the gaming world. Technology is seeing massive cuts and layoffs, with Intel's recent announcement being remarkably huge, and I'm not going to show that here, but if you didn't hear about it, essentially Intel cut about, I think it was only about 7% or something of their global workforce, but it was around 15,000 jobs that it just snapped, got rid of. But anyway, and so is the entertainment space. So not only is Warner Brothers Discovery currently searching for ways to right the ship, but Paramount has unveiled a huge cost-cutting measure that aims to save the company around half a billion dollars, and that is expected to see thousands of employees laid off. Specifically, it's the Paramount Television Studios that are being shut down. As per Variety, it's mentioned at this close, you will see all in-development shows and productions shifted over to CBS Studios. As for what will happen to future productions remains unclear, but no doubt this will have not only an impact on Paramount Plus's original offering down the line, but also original content elsewhere, as Paramount TV Studios was responsible for the creation of Apple TV Plus's Time Bandits, Roku's The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Prime Video's Jack Ryan show, just to name a few. So the shutdown is expected to cut costs by $500 million."

"Now this is quite an interesting thing for me, because $500 million is a huge amount of money, but in a sort of corporation sense, especially when you're looking at a production giant like Paramount, and I say production giant, and I mean things like Disney, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, you know, all these sort of ones that you sort of align, when you think of Hollywood, you think of these major production companies, you know, when you go to the cinema and you see their logos at the start of a movie, and Paramount's one of the biggest. So $500 million is a lot of money, but for Paramount, it's, I'm not going to say it's a drop in the water, because half a billion dollars is a big amount of money, regardless of how you look at it, but it is not as big a number as you would think for a company of Paramount's size. For example, when Paramount has a really good movie, and it makes, let's say, let's say you look at something like Top Gun Maverick a couple of years ago, and it's one of the all-time best movies, all-time best sort of selling movies of all time, and it makes like $1.5 billion. When you think that that movie alone generated more revenue, or three times as much revenue, as Paramount axing its entire television division, it shows that, you know, the money is kind of relative in this situation. But the one thing to note as well about this is that I think this is going to have huge repercussions for Paramount down the line, because you look at the streaming space right now, and you've got all these major titans like Netflix, like Prime Video, like Disney, and I think they're all sort of, they all sort of work in different manners. I think Netflix has sort of got the sector kind of under a chokehold a bit. Disney, I think it works for them, but when you look at Disney, what it produces every month, or, you know, even every year, it's quite limited a batch of content. Prime Video is probably the closest competitor to Netflix really, and even then, I think that's only really been the case as of late after Amazon purchased MGM Studios a few years ago. Yes, Max is also a big contender as well, and the reason I haven't brought it up is because we actually don't have Max in the UK. We still rely on Sky and stuff like that, but there are a couple of other ones that we've seen doing well as of late. Apple TV Plus is quite popular, not as popular as some of these other established ones, and these established titans that have lots of backing with the production giant, but Paramount Plus, to me, has always been one of those sort of streaming services that has really struggled. They tend to have much original content coming out, and the original content that does come out tends to be a lot of sort of, let's say like lifestyle content, a lot of soaps and stuff like that, and I think we're going to see more of that down the line, because if CBS Studios is staying open, but Paramount TV Studios is getting shut down, then the original productions that we see from things like, I mean, I'm not going to tell you that Halo was like a tentpole thing that should have been saved at all costs, but I think we're going to see more of those sort of soap things and less things like Halo down the line on Paramount Plus, and maybe that means also we won't see as many sort of interesting productions and other services that use Paramount TV as well. But again, we'll see whether this is the case down the line. This is one of massive change like this happens. You don't really see the impact for a couple of years."

"It's not something that just happens overnight, so we'll stay tuned and see what this means, but I would expect Paramount Plus to become an even sparser content offering. Maybe Paramount will look at a way to merge it with another streaming service, because we have seen that before with like Warner Brothers and Discovery merging together, Max and Discovery Plus and stuff like that. So we'll stay tuned for more information about this, and otherwise I'll be back now tomorrow for the last year TV news from me for the week. So yeah, stay tuned for that, and otherwise I hope you enjoy the rest of your Thursday. Take care, everyone."