With the writers strike into its second month and a potential actors strike looming, someone is going to have to find a middle ground. And on Tuesday, the head of CBS George Cheeks outlined one way in which the writers and the studios could still find a compromise.
It has something to do with windowing and the licensing content. Streaming residuals has been one of the WGA’s key sticking points in negotiations with the AMPTP, namely because there aren’t enough of them. But if streamers started rethinking hoarding all their content exclusively and instead were open to windowing or licensing their shows and movies to other outlets, whether that’s putting them back on cable or broadcast, on other streamers, or on FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) services, suddenly there’s new opportunities to pay out residuals.
Cheeks said on Tuesday at the Banff World Media Festival in Alberta, Canada that they’re open to doing just that, including potentially putting Paramount+ shows onto linear to help expand their audience.
“The one positive there is that I actually think that will help us with our creative partners because one of the big issues they complain about is streaming residuals,” Cheeks said on Tuesday (via Variety). “But I think the more that we’re not locking the shows on one platform, [the more we] actually license out more revenue to the studios and get more residuals for our partners.”
Turns out this old-fashioned idea of licensing is becoming all the rage. Amazon announced they would do it with a handful of their shows and movies. Disney reportedly is exploring doing the same. And Warner Bros. Discovery after moving many of its shows off Max plans to relocate them to its own FAST channel.
But as Cheeks said Tuesday, the reason it’s happening is because the equation for how to impress Wall Street with streaming is changing.
“A year-plus ago, it was ‘figure your streaming out, build your [subscriber acquisition] at any cost, profits be damned.’ That was sort of the mandate. And then all of a sudden it became the opposite,” he said. “Now it’s ‘how fast can you get to profitability?’ And if you are profitable already, how do you enhance that profitability? It’s forcing all of us take a step back and really rationalize our contents spends and forcing streamers to ask is it really a sacrosanct view that we have to have everything on the platform exclusively.”
As the writers have made clear, solving streaming residuals isn’t the only issue that will get the guild to end this strike, but it’s a big one, and one that the directors have already made some progress on in their own negotiations. And in terms of what that means for how CBS plans moving forward into the fall, Cheeks is still “hopeful that we will all find compromises.”
“The DGA deal tentative agreement was helpful; let’s see what happens with SAG,” Cheeks said. “I would just say that, as opposed to broadcast where that series model is tight and works very well for our creative partners, I do think the way that the streaming series model is evolved poses serious challenges for creative partners that we have to figure out.”
Elsewhere in the conference, Cheeks revealed that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was extended for another three years, and he also confirmed that taking the place of “The Late Late Show with James Corden” will now be “@Midnight,” as was previously reported but never confirmed. The old Comedy Central game show/variety show featured comedians riffing and reacting to internet memes and viral videos in a series of different mini games. The show was hosted by Chris Hardwick and ran nightly for four seasons. The only reason it hasn’t been made formal until now though is that Cheeks said the writers strike prevented CBS from locking down a showrunner and head writer, but that will happen once the writers strike is over.
