http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/08/04/cbs-viacom-merger-moonves-out-if-doesnt-get-on-board-a
- Thread starter brejust
- Start date
- Latest activity Latest activity:
- Replies 6
- Views 1K
Didn't they just separate the two companies a few years back ? Now they want to merge again? WTF?
Didn't they just separate the two companies a few years back ? Now they want to merge again? WTF?
Viacom bought out the old Westinghouse Corp. that owned CBS in 1999. In 2005, they spun CBS and Showtime off into a separate corporation.
I am certainly no fan of Les Mooves. He is one of, if not the most significant, inflationary influences in the TV industry. Look at CBS Now. You wanna catch up with our shows if you missed the first airing....PAY UP! Wanna watch the new Star Trek series? Pay Up! He thinks he is positioning himself to the cord cutters, but in the end I think he (by creating shows exclusive to Now, is sacrificing what could be a rock solid, and ad generating cash cow for CBS proper. I would love to see (though we probably never will) seen the P/L's for CBS Now. Now, on the the issue of Viacom, as much as I would love to see Les fired, he is organically right in fighting the merger, because it would slowly eat away at CBS. It's a financial albatross. The Jurassic thinking Redstones would be better off by selling (probably at fire sale pricing) Viacom and finally get that monkey off their back, and perhaps hand it to someone better suited to market and or revise the product to become more profitable.
For the record, I absolutely hate him. Slightly off-topic, but back in the early 2000s, Moonves was quoted as saying "Every half-hour of a game show that's on the air means a hundred people in Hollywood are out of work, and by that I mean writers, producers, directors." So it's no surprise to me every time CBS treats the genre like a plague, constantly avoiding it at all costs in primetime. They also cancel good highly-rated shows like Million Dollar Password and instead give us garbage like Candy Crush (which barely hits a 0.5 in the demo, telling us how unconnected they are with their audience). That being said, I also wouldn't be surprised if Moonves was the idiot behind all of these decisions as well, considering his feelings toward the genre as a whole.
And on the Star Trek matter... it's sad when a company that's licensing the new series for airing, actually makes better decisions than the company producing the actual show themselves. By that, I'm talking about the fact that in Canada, the entire Discovery series will air on traditional TV, every Sunday night on the SPACE channel. That is how CBS should be doing it; not just airing the premiere and then forcing you to subscribe to All Access for the rest. I wouldn't be surprised if next year, the low viewership and massive amounts of pirating of the episodes will be used by CBS and Moonves as an excuse as to why the series isn't profitable (or as profitable as they anticipated), and then blame that as the main reason for cancellation, when in reality, it's their own dang fault for not airing it on TV.
Even if Discovery was on a premium movie channel like HBO or Showtime, it would still be miles better than being exclusive to a miniscule SVOD service that pales in comparison to the likes of Netflix or Hulu or even Amazon Prime.
Moonves should be fired and replaced by someone who actually has a brain in their head.
IMHO,
- Star Trek will be a total failure. Anyone who wants to will watch it for free.
- CBS continues to be the #1 network simply because it devotes more hours to quality filmed entertainment and less to game shows and other filler garbage.
- Star Trek will be a total failure. Anyone who wants to will watch it for free.
- CBS continues to be the #1 network simply because it devotes more hours to quality filmed entertainment and less to game shows and other filler garbage.
