Capital Calls: ViacomCBS's royal premium

Paramount Global

09/03/2021 16:11

(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.  The opinions
expressed are their own.)
    NEW YORK, March 9 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Concise insights
on global finance in the Covid-19 era.
 
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MEGXIT BOOST. Television royalty plus the real-life kind are a
potent mix for broadcaster ViacomCBS  VIACA.O . Oprah Winfrey’s
blockbuster interview with Prince Harry and his wife Meghan –
the first since the couple decamped from royal life and headed
to the United States – drew some 17 million viewers on Sunday
night to network CBS  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2L61I5, crowning the program one of
the most watched non-Super Bowl events on Sunday in primetime in
over a year. It was a boon in other ways for parent ViacomCBS
and a good way to seed more subscribers to its streaming service
Paramount+.
    Shares of the media firm hit a new high on Monday and added
more than $5 billion to ViacomCBS’s market value. Taking rival
Netflix’s  NFLX.O  valuation as a yardstick, a single streaming
customer is worth around $1,000 to investors. So it’s as if
Oprah delivered ViacomCBS 5 million new viewers. The company is
projecting that it can nab around 65 million customers to
Paramount+ by 2024  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2KU2DB. The catch is that Viacom’s
value was already falling back again by Tuesday. Celebrity
revelations pack a punch, but the trick is to keep them coming.
(By Jennifer Saba)

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 (Editing by John Foley and Amanda Gomez)