Paramount Plus will be the exclusive streaming home for all Paramount Pictures movies beginning in 2024.
The announcement, which was made at ViacomCBS’s investor day on Tuesday, is a sign of how much the media giant is investing in its streaming service. It means that the company will forgo lucrative and profitable short-term licensing revenue in order to grow its library of content and with it, build its subscriber base. In another signal of the importance of Paramount Plus to the future of the company, ViacomCBS is being rebranded as Paramount as of Wednesday.
But Paramount has already been pushing its best content to its streaming arm. It announced that two of its recent big screen successes, which include “Jackass Forever” and “Scream,” will hit Paramount Plus in March after debuting in theaters in January. Paramount, like many major studios, has dramatically reduced its theatrical window, the length of time movies screen exclusively in theaters. Before the pandemic, most studios had windows of 90 days. Now, that window has shrunk to 45 days for companies like Paramount.
It also comes as media conglomerates such as Disney, Comcast and WarnerMedia have launched their own streaming services in a bid to field their own in-house Netflix challengers.
The company announced that Paramount Plus and Showtime gained 9.4 million streaming subscribers during the most recent quarter, topping a combined 56 million subscribers by the end of last year. The company said it expected to have 100 million subscribers by 2024.
In another shift, Paramount Plus announced it will start integrating Showtime content this summer, launching an in-app upgrade that includes access to the pay TV channel’s programming.