US: CBS, Viacom to reunite in merger creating $30B company

CBS and Viacom, two television programming companies that split more than a decade ago, finalized a merger deal Tuesday, August 13, to recombine, creating a single entity with about US$30 billion in market value. The new company, which will be called ViacomCBS, brings brands like CBS and Showtime together with the likes of Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, Comedy Central, and Paramount.

A CBS-Viacom reunion is the latest in a wave of mergers and acquisitions of traditional media companies, as they try to come to grips with the scale of their emerging competitors in the tech world. Netflix and YouTube dominate eyeballs online, and companies like Apple and Amazon, with market caps hovering around US$1 trillion, are delving more deeply into video programming. In response, legacy media companies are consolidating to bulk up.

Once the deal is completed, expected by the end of the year, ViacomCBS will have a combined library with more than 140,000 TV episodes and 3,600 film titles, including franchises such as “Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible.”