Paramount Plus for the Nordics Will Be Phased Out and Merged With SkyShowtime in 2022
Published on August 19, 2021
- Paramount Plus for Nordic countries will be sunset and merged into the upcoming ‘SkyShowtime’.
- This is a strategic business decision of costs, viability, and operational leanness.
- Existing Paramount Plus subscribers should notice no disruptions at the time of the merger.
The standalone version of Paramount Plus in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway, will eventually be wrapped up as the owner, ViacomCBS, has decided that a merger with SkyShowtime would have better economic and viability prospects. As such, the streaming service will be turned into a part of another product of the same company, which can be seen as an internal restructuring of business plans. The merger will take place in 2022, concomitant with SkyShowtime launching in 28 European countries.
This, however, doesn’t mean that Paramount Plus Nordic will change in terms of functionality, content availability, or investment funding. The service will continue as planned and will move to SkyShowtime with a rich portfolio next year. All existing subscribers will be automatically passed to the new entity. At the same time, the pricing for SkyShowtime in the Nordics should follow a comparable structure with the existing one, although this hasn’t been touched upon in the relevant announcements.
SkyShowtime is a joint venture between ViacomCBS and Comcast, two broadcasting giants looking to capture significant parts of the highly valuable yet patchy European market. Right now, the new platform is awaiting regulatory approval, so nothing is certain at this point. If all goes well, it’ll be made available in the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.
According to what has been made known so far, the new platform will offer more than 10,000 hours of entertainment, including originals and exclusives, that will launch every month to keep the interest warm.
As the CEO of ViacomCBS Networks International has stated previously:
Paramount Plus was born only on March 4, 2021, replacing CBS All Access, while the Nordics got the service on March 25, 2021, through Apple TV, Telenor, Nuuday, and Allente. As such, the change in strategy comes very soon after all that, underlining the shifting dynamics that come into play in the highly competitive market of streaming.
