• by Wayne Friedman , February 19, 2024

Amid a slew of reports about legacy media companies merging or selling their streamers in a bundle, Comcast Corp. and Paramount Global are now in early talks about combining their U.S. services, according to reports.

This comes as Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently dismissed streaming merger talks with other legacy media D2C businesses for the most part during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts.

Representatives from Comcast and Paramount Global did not return messages by press time.

As of September 2023, Paramount+ said it had 63.4 million U.S. subscribers.

Comcast said Peacock has grown to 31 million paid subscribers at the end of 2023.

For the nine-month period ending September 2023, Paramount’s entire direct-to-consumer ad revenue (including Paramount+ and Pluto TV) was up 18% to $1.3 billion. For 2023, Peacock took in $1.4 billion in advertising revenue. 

In separate news, Comcast and Paramount, which jointly operate Europe’s SkyShowtime streaming TV-video platform, announced plans to launch an ad-supported tier.

The ‘Standard with Ads’ plan will launch on April 23.