Reporting its first quarterly earnings since taking over the newly rechristened Paramount as a Skydance corporation 96 days earlier, the media company’s new management on Monday touted a 17% YoY revenue rise to $2.17 billion in Q3 for what is now their core business, direct-to-consumer video streaming.
Alongside Q3 earnings Paramount CEO David Ellison said the company expects full-year 2025 profitability for its direct-to-consumer streaming operations (DTC profitability in 2025 was also expected under prior management as of Q1 earnings), a unit the company repeatedly called its “North Star” business.
“And it will be increasingly profitable in 2026,” Ellison told equity analysts.
In Q3 total Paramount Skydance revenue missed expectations at $6.7 billion (but flat YoY on a pro forma basis), and net losses totaled $257 million. (You can read Paramount Skydance’s Q3 letter to shareholders here.)
Again, building scale for Paramount+, as well as the two other assets in the media giant’s streaming portfolio, niche SVOD BET+ and FAST Pluto TV, is the main priority.
Paramount+ ended September with 79.1 million subscribers, up 1.4 million in the third quarter. But in a world in which success is sometimes defined by a Netflix-like 300 million-plus paid users globally, there is still plenty of work and room to scale.
While rumors swirl, Ellison didn’t comment about the potential for Paramount to buy Warner Bros. Discovery to help achieve that goal.
But as it looks to scale streaming, Paramount also intends to put more money into content, with the shareholder letter citing plans for more than $1.5 billion in incremental programming investment in 2026, including DTC investments in UFC, originals, third-party catalog licensing and ramping up its film slate.
With investment into content and an eye on profitability, Paramount said it will raise prices for its SVOD in the U.S. early in Q1 next year.
There’s also investment focus on technology and Ellison talked about consolidating the three separate tech stacks for his company’s three streaming operations, which will happen next year.
Also discussed was the ongoing integration of the studio’s first enterprise software solution, the cloud-based Oracle Fusion. There are family ties to the vendor as Ellison is the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
In David Ellison’s view, having Oracle’s software onboard provides an essential dashboard. “It’s like if you are a pilot,” he said Monday. “Having instrumentation is important.”
Then there’s Paramount’s fast-declining TV networks, down 12% in Q3 to $3.8 billion in revenue.
Jeff Shell, the former head of NBCUniversal and now president of Paramount Skydance, described the difference between his company’s broadcast and cable businesses as being “pretty stark.” In fact, the CBS Television Network was actually an asset the company’s new management team was “particularly excited about” when it closed on the $8 billion Paramount acquisition over the summer.
Averaging an industry-best 5 million-plus viewers in prime time, CBS offers unrivaled reach, Shell noted, not to mention access to that most coveted of media-business life’s blood, live NFL football. Overall, he described a plan under which CBS will remain an important complement to Paramount+ moving forward.
But the declines among core cable properties including Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central are much steeper. There are not plans to spin these assets off, as Comcast has with its NBCUniversal cable channels and Warner Bros. Discovery continues to weigh a linear network split from its studio and streaming businesses.
“We’re focused on taking those brands and seeing what we can do with them digitally to drive profits,” Shell said.
Paramount’s advertising revenue was down 12% yoy in the quarter to $1.465 billion.
On Monday, Ellison also touted the October hiring of former Roku and Publicis executive Jay Askinasi as chief revenue officer.
Certainly, there has been plenty of activity since Ellison took over Paramount in early August to tub thump, including: the $7.7 billion exclusive U.S. rights deal for the UFC; the poaching of the Stranger Things production duo, the Duffer Brothers, from Netflix; the blowout revival of a Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park; and the $150 million acquisition of news entrepreneur Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, to name a few.
There’s also been some negatives, including the exit of prolific producer Taylor Sheridan for NBCUniversal (although he’ll produce for Paramount until the end of his contract through 2028) and the layoff of 1,600 workers, which came from the company’s divestiture of TV stations in Chile and Argentina, after an earlier round that cut 1,000 employees primarily in the U.S.
Ellison noted that cost synergies from the merger will reach $3 billion verses an earlier expectation of $2 billion.