Viacom CBS is calling it Paramount+, but the big news is the how the theatrical window is about to be sliced in half.

On March 4, the 20 million of you who currently subscribe to CBS All Access, home of all those awful Woke Trek series — will now subscribe to Paramount+.

Like WarnerMedia with HBO MAX, NBCUniversal with Peacock, and Disney with Disney+, ViacomCBS is bigfooting its way into the future — which is streaming —  by leveraging all of its catalogue into one place, and that catalogue included Paramount’s movies and CBS’s TV series.

At launch Paramount+ will offer 2,500 movies and 30,000 TV episodes.

Naturally, Paramount+ will also produce original TV content exclusive to its platform. More Woke Trek, Yellowstone, etc.

Here’s how the pricing will work:

ViacomCBS will offer Paramount+ at two different price points. An ad-supported tier that features live NFL games, CBSN and thousands of on-demand original and library titles will cost $5 per month. An ad-free tier that also includes mores live sports, live local news and live CBS network programming will cost $10 per month. The lower priced tier, which won’t be available to subscribers until June, is $1 cheaper than what what it cost to subscribe to CBS All Access with ads.

Paramount+ subscribers will also be able to bundle a subscription to sister streamer Showtime for an additional fee.

But the following, at least to me, is the most interesting piece of news… Paramount+ is slicing the 90 day theatrical window in half:

On the film side, the service will benefit from shortened theatrical windows for many of ViacomCBS titles. Both A Quiet Place Part II and Mission: Impossible 7 will stream on Paramount+ 45 days after they leave theaters, or about half the normal time it would take for a film to become available after leaves theaters. Under terms of a new output deal with MGM’s premium network Epix, the studio’s features, including Lady Gaga-starrer House of Gucci, Rocky franchise sequel Creed III and James Bond pic No Time to Die will head to Paramount+ after their theatrical runs.

You might say, Well, HBO Max is doing even worse. It’s releasing its movie in theaters and to HBO Max on the very same day.

Yes, but as of now, that is only for one year, a way for Warners to use its theatrical inventory to build its streaming platform during the coronavirus scare.

Paramount+ is not giving is 45 day window a deadline. It sounds like this will be the new policy, which tells you just how vital streaming has become.

If you’ve been reading Breitbart for a while, you know we predicted the future of entertainment would be streaming, and did so long before anyone else did… We predicted it while the so-called “experts” said people canceling their cable TV would slow and streaming only had so much potential.

Well, I found those naysayers to be either liars looking to protect a stock price or wholly ignorant. Anyone who subscribed to Netflix Streaming, even in its infancy, knew streaming was the future of — not just of TV, but entertainment as a whole. Watch what you want when you want. No appointment TV, no commercials, no full DVRs. The streaming service itself is a DVR overwhelmed with everything, and always adding more, with a cost — at least compared to cable TV — that is ridiculously affordable.

And now we’re seeing that streaming is becoming so important that the major entertainment companies are willing to slice the throat of movie theaters, of a whole section of their business, and the one with the most prestige.

Why?

Money.

More precisely…

Netflix money.

Netflix currently has around 200 million worldwide subscribers, which means Netflix brings in around two billion — with a “b” — a month in subscriber revenue. That’s $24 billion a year, which doesn’t include the money Netflix makes syndicating its shows to other outlets and on DVD.

Imagine being a company where every month you can count on two billion in revenue sailing in… That is so much better than the movie business,  where you can spend three years and $300 million working on a product like, say, Justice League, and still lose your shirt.

Content, content, content… That’s the future. Everything will be about content. Everything will be about attracting subscribers and, most importantly, holding on to subscribers — which is why Disney+ doesn’t drop full seasons of shows like The Mandolorian and WandaVision all at once. You have to keep paying to keep watching. This is why HBO Max disappears its big theatrical releases after 31 day. That way you can’t subscribe once every six months, binge all of them, cancel, and re-subscribe again in another six months.

To keep us paying month in and month out, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a whole bunch of other services begin to pop up on streaming services. Maybe chat features so you can watch with friends and family; maybe even videogames and mundane things like email, digital storage…

Content is also going to change. We will see a whole lot more shows like The Mandolorian that hook viewers for years, and a lot fewer movies that hook us for only two hours.

When it comes to visual entertainment, everything is going to be about hooking us and holding us… And that means the addiction of long-form storytelling like Yellowstone, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones…

Movie theaters are in even more trouble than they know.

 

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