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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

ViacomCBS Africa Should Consider Reconstructing And Perhaps Streamlining It's Channels


ViacomCBS (formerly Viacom) has been in the market for approximately 15 years with its reality skewed brand, MTV being their longest running channel within the market.

Other channels they manage is Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr, Nicktoons, MTV Base and in South Africa, MTV Music 24. Former channels include BET Jazz, VH1 and VH1 Classic.

Now to get back to the topic, streaming has taken over people's lives especially in the United States where millions of consumers dump cable in favor of this phenomenon.

Netflix started the trend and has been dominating for over a decade now they have competition such as HBO Max, CBS All Access (soon to be Paramount+) and Disney+.

These competitors host a bunch of linear channels for international markets and since these platforms launched it had their affects towards those channels which led some markets to cutback on channels.

Disney Africa aligned their channels not much to streamline there, WarnerMedia Africa doesn't have much to streamline perhaps dispose but ViacomCBS definitely has a ton of reorganizing.

On the entertainment section in which streaming has no affect, BET and Comedy Central are redundant so the channel that will likely pay for their that is MTV. I can see a future where ViacomCBS ask themselves why should MTV be used for reality when it stands for music.

MTV Base is already very popular across Africa particularly in Nigeria where they're #1 while MTV has been ignored ever since ViacomCBS decided to introduce more MTV channels I would have preferred if they kept it under the brand VH1 but that won't happen since the brand is done for.

The reality shows seen on MTV would blend right in on BET particularly all that local stuff like Lasizwe and Guy Code. Perhaps the rest would sit better on another entertainment channel like Paramount even though the U.S. plan to make it look like AMC there's still chances that other markets won't adapt to that.

TNT did relaunch as a movie channel and Universal doesn't have original programming.

On the kids side which is somewhat meh, Nickelodeon has a Nick@Nite block (occasionally and not for kids), Nick Jr block (excluding South Africa) and repeats of acquired shows from its sister channel, Nicktoons which is understandable since the channel is more accessible outside of South Africa and putting them on Nickelodeon gives them better exposure.

Nicktoons came in as a reruns channel which benefits South Africa in terms of accessibility then had an overflow of acquisitions followed by the Nick Jr. block while the preschool brand is somewhat decent and isn't heavily reliant on acquisitions.

On the streaming side, I can see how this will affect Nick Jr since there's not a lot on their plate perhaps you'll see more acquisitions and Nickelodeon will go back to being the exclusive home for that as well leaving Nicktoons with the scraps once again or at least 90% of the scraps.

In short, there's a lot of redundancy in their stable you have to wonder how long it will be till MultiChoice catches on and does something about it. They already removed plenty of channels only for their shows to service in other channels to give them some form of sustainability all that's left to improve is their stable.

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