ViacomCBS VIAC -1.00% Chief Executive Bob Bakish said that uproar over some content is inevitable for major media companies, following outcry over a Netflix Inc. special by comedian Dave Chappelle that some employees of the streaming service said was offensive to the transgender community.
In his remarks Monday, made during a WSJ Tech Live interview, Mr. Bakish declined to address the Netflix dust-up directly but said that ViacomCBS has had its own brushes with controversy over the years and likely will again.
“If you’re going to be in the mass-market business, you’re going to inevitably run into some of these issues, and you have to manage them with finesse,” Mr. Bakish said. “Ultimately, yeah, there may be some stuff you have to pull, as you look at it. But it is not unusual to be there.”
During the 30-minute interview, Mr. Bakish addressed ViacomCBS’s programming strategy, approach to mergers and acquisitions and the resolution of a Hollywood labor dispute that could have led to an industrywide production shutdown.
Since closing its merger with CBS, ViacomCBS has focused on its streaming efforts, launching its flagship Paramount+ service earlier this year and announcing a slate of programming for the service, including a series based on the popular Halo videogame. In August, ViacomCBS said it would team up with Comcast Corp. to launch a joint streaming service in Europe to attract larger audiences.
Like many media companies with roots in the pay-TV boom, ViacomCBS’s primary challenge is to compete with video-streaming heavyweights without sacrificing its traditional TV business. ViacomCBS said in August that its streaming efforts, including Paramount+ and ad-supported service PlutoTV, generated $983 million in revenue in the second quarter, a 92% increase in that category over the previous year. Like its legacy media peers, ViacomCBS still lags behind Netflix in streaming revenue.
The industrywide shift toward video-streaming has caused tension between actors who are accustomed to big payouts associated with traditional theatrical releases and major media companies that are launching movies on their streaming platforms. That friction became apparent earlier this year when actress Scarlett Johansson sued Walt Disney Co. over compensation for “Black Widow,” which was released simultaneously in theaters and on the Disney+ streaming service. That lawsuit was settled in September.
Mr. Bakish said during the interview that the streaming-video revolution has forced a change in relations between media companies and actors, including a reassessment of how TV shows and movies should be distributed
“We have to evolve, but we have to evolve in a partnerly way,” Mr. Bakish said.
In response to a question about a potential combination with a rival such as Comcast or a company in another sector, Mr. Bakish noted that “a lot of deals get unwound” when they don’t work out. He added that what he described as the company’s organic streaming plan is the strongest route to creating value for shareholders.
“We see nice momentum ahead of us and that’s the lane I continue to feel we should be focused on,” Mr. Bakish said.
During the interview, Mr. Bakish said the company’s decision to license some of its most popular programming to rivals—as it did when it sold the streaming rights to the comedy show “South Park” to WarnerMedia for its HBO Max service and the Western drama “Yellowstone” to NBCUniversal for inclusion on its Peacock service—was “the right thing to do.”
Mr. Bakish said that the decisions to license those shows were made before Viacom’s 2019 merger with CBS closed, when the company didn’t have a way to build a major subscription-supported streaming service.
“So rather than do something that would likely turn out to be unsuccessful, we chose to focus on free with Pluto and license content,” Mr. Bakish said. “Fast-forward to today, we’re in a very different place.”
Write to Benjamin Mullin at [email protected]
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