- CBS All Access will be renamed Paramount Plus in early 2021.
- The rebranding will reflect the expansion to other channels as well as live news and sports.
- Paramount Plus will also come to Australia, Latin America and the Nordic countries in 2021.
CBS All Access is becoming a much larger service, and ViacomCBS believes it needs to be rebranded accordingly. The expanded streaming service will be renamed Paramount Plus in early 2021 to reflect its broader scope – and we would add that we can better compete with competitors.
The more extensive service includes movies and shows from a wider selection of channels and studios including Paramount, BET and MTV. You can also expect breaking news, live sports, and “premium entertainment” which includes more streaming-only originals. Paramount Plus receives five new originals as part of the announcement, including a miniseries based on the making of “The Godfather” (“The Offer”), the spy drama “Lioness”, a rethinking of MTV’s “Behind the Music” (“Hinter der Musik – The Top 40 ”), the true crime documentary series“ The Real Criminal Minds ”and a BET revival of“ The Game ”.
The CBS All Access rebranding will make it available outside of North America as well. Paramount Plus will be available in Australia, Latin America and the Nordic countries sometime in 2021. The media giant has typically made shows like “Star Trek: Discovery” available through services like Netflix in countries where CBS All Access wasn’t available, so it doesn’t have to do it that often in the future.
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The catalog should be expanded to over 30,000 TV episodes and films by the time the name change comes into effect.
ViacomCBS may not have had much choice. CBS All Access quickly became a restrictive name that implied access to only the content of one channel. The Paramount Plus name could help it compete (or gain an edge) on services like HBO Max, Hulu, and NBCU’s Peacock, all of which promise access to a wide variety of materials, though naming schemes sometimes suggest otherwise.
Whether that will help or not is not certain. CBS All Access and Showtime’s internet service combined had 10 million subscribers in early 2020, but HBO Max already had 4.1 million as of July, weeks after its May 27 debut. This excludes established streaming giants like Netflix, which had 72.9 million subscribers in the US alone in the second quarter of this year. Ultimately, Paramount Plus will need enough originals to reel people in – a new name will only go so far.