Paramount Plus Is No Disney Plus When It Comes to ‘Hard’ Pay TV Bundling, Analyst Says

On Thursday during Paramount Global's third-quarter earnings call, CEO Bob Bakish said his company was exploring with pay TV operators the prospect of wholesale “hard bundles” of Paramount Plus, on top of legacy linear network carriage deals.

This was, of course, tied to the widely proclaimed landmark deal between Disney and Charter Communications that centered on the cable operator obtaining wholesale pricing of Disney Plus and including it in its video customers' programming packages.

Indeed, a lot of folks in the video business view the Charter-Disney deal as a blueprint for how cable operators in the future will take video off their QAM networks and serve their core broadband constituencies the on-demand streaming choices they crave.

For the streamer, not only does such bundling reduce customer acquisition cost to next to nothing, Bakish said, it grows customer ranks and reduces subscriber churn.

But it may be that not all “Plusses” are accretive to the bundle.

The analysts at MoffettNathanson say they’re “skeptical” about the strategy as it pertains to Paramount Plus, which they believe doesn't add the same kind of "incremental value" to a standard pay TV package that Disney Plus does.

According to analyst Robert Fishman, rather than cannibalize Disney linear channels, Disney Plus adds programming elements such as original series and movies, as well as Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars titles.

“How incremental to the linear bundle is Paramount Plus?” Fishman asked. “With simulcasts of CBS stations included within the app, including coveted sports rights such as the NFL, we remain skeptical the company will be able to get true wholesale incremental value.

“Moreover,” the analyst added, “any deal to provision Paramount Plus to linear subscribers will inevitably lead to a certain level of cannibalization of full, retail-rate paying subscriptions.”