Industry

Following Netflix’s solid third-quarter earnings, all eyes are now on major legacy entertainment companies such as Paramount Global to assess the state of the industry.

Paramount Global faces questions about its ability to effectively monetize is wealth of highly in-demand content, from CBS procedurals that dominate streaming charts to 2022’s biggest movie so far, Top Gun: Maverick. Wells Fargo just downgraded the company’s stock, as the advertising market faces serious headwinds.

Paramount Global (12.4%) had the third-highest corporate demand share with US audiences in Q3 2022, trailing only Warner Bros. Discovery (17.9%) and The Walt Disney Company (19.8%). The company aims to carry the momentum from its strong linear TV operation over to streaming, where it continues to build up Paramount+ and free ad-supported streaming TV service Pluto TV. The future of Showtime as both a linear and OTT entity remains in flux.

While Paramount Global is in third place in corporate share, Paramount+ is in fifth place in total on-platform demand, and seventh in originals demand share in the US. That said, Paramount+’s originals demand share has now grown in four of the last five quarters, which has coincided with consistent subscriber growth.

As speculation about the next big media merger ramps up, Parrot Analytics' data highlights one potential threat to Disney on the horizon. Corporate demand share data shows that a strictly hypothetical, regulatory environment notwithstanding, merger between NBCUniversal’s and Paramount Global’s media assets would create a company that accounts for 22.2% US corporate demand share, roughly three percentage points higher than Disney.

The Warner Bros. Discovery merger put it within two points of Disney in this category, but NBCU and Paramount combined would immediately leapfrog Disney as the dominant media company in the US in terms of cross platform audience demand for TV content.