Friday, January 31, 2020

CBS All Access Adds Nickelodeon Programming

Nick-Nick-Nick-Nick-N-Nick-Nick-Nick, Nick on CBS is back - kind off!


CBS All Access, CBS’ digital subscription video on-demand and live streaming service, has added fan-favorite Nickelodeon series Danny Phantom, Avatar: The Last Airbender sequel The Legend of Korra and iCarly and Victorious spin-off Sam & Cat to its programming library! The series were added on Monday, January 6, 2020.

Subscribers can now stream seasons 1 & 2 (26 episodes) of The Legend of Korra, seasons 1 & 2 (37 episodes) of Danny Phantom; and all 35 episodes of Sam & Cat on CBS All Access.

The addition to Nickelodeon programming is part of CBS All Access' efforts to make the service appeal to kids and families. “We’re bringing to market a fantastic roster of exclusive originals along with a library of marquee series for families, and we look forward to continuing to expand our children’s programming offering, especially with the future addition of incredible programming from Nickelodeon,” said Marc DeBevoise, President and COO, CBS Interactive in November 2019. The news follows Viacom and CBS merging to become one company in December 2019.

Danny Phantom, The Legend of Korra and Sam & Cat join previously added children's series to the service, such as: The Adventures of Paddington Bear, Bob The Builder, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Danger Mouse, Danger Mouse Classic*, Heathcliff*, Inspector Gadget*, Inspector Gadget's Field Trip and The New Adventures of Madeline. All children's series can be found under the 'Kids' tab on the CBS All Access website and app.

* Previously aired on Nickelodeon in the '80s and '90s.

All CBS All Access children’s programming will be available commercial-free. At launch, parental pin controls will be available across the following platforms: CBS.com, the CBS app for iOS and Android, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV*, Roku and Xbox One. Parental controls will be available across additional connected TV platforms in the near future. The service is currently offering a free trial.

Official ViacomCBS press release via TheFutonCritic.com:

CBS ALL ACCESS TO DEBUT THREE NEW ORIGINAL CHILDREN'S SERIES FROM DREAMWORKS ANIMATION'S CLASSIC MEDIA

"Lassie," "George of the Jungle" and "Mr. Magoo" Launching Jan. 17

PASADENA, Calif. - Jan. 12, 2019 - CBS All Access, CBS' digital subscription video on-demand and live streaming service, today announced plans for three new original children's series from DreamWorks Animation's Classic Media. Beginning Friday, Jan. 17, subscribers will be able to stream all-new editions of LASSIE, GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE and MR. MAGOO. The announcement was made by Marc DeBevoise, Chief Digital Officer, ViacomCBS, and President and CEO, CBS Interactive, during CBS All Access' biannual presentation to the Television Critics Association.

"We've seen a tremendous response from our subscribers in just the few months since CBS All Access began offering children's programming," said Marc DeBevoise. "Bringing new editions of legendary classics like LASSIE, GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE and MR. MAGOO to the service is a fantastic benchmark for CBS All Access, and we look forward to continuing to expand our offering for families."

These three new series join CBS All Access' existing lineup of exclusive original children's series, including new seasons of CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS and the new DANGER MOUSE, as well the service's growing library of hit children's programming, including BOB THE BUILDER, INSPECTOR GADGET, HEATHCLIFF, THE ADVENTURES OF PADDINGTON BEAR and more, plus recently added Nickelodeon series THE LEGEND OF KORRA, SAM & CAT and DANNY PHANTOM, with additional series to be added. CBS All Access' library of children's programming will grow to more than 1,000 episodes as additional series are added over the coming weeks.

All CBS All Access children's programming is available commercial-free.

About CBS All Access:

CBS All Access is CBS' direct-to-consumer digital subscription video on-demand and live streaming service. CBS All Access gives subscribers the ability to watch more than 12,000 episodes on demand - spanning exclusive original series, CBS Television Network's primetime, daytime and late night shows, plus classic TV hits - as well as the ability to stream local CBS stations live across the U.S. CBS All Access' original series include THE GOOD FIGHT, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, TELL ME A STORY, NO ACTIVITY, and WHY WOMEN KILL, as well as the upcoming INTERROGATION, THE STAND, and THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. CBS All Access is also the exclusive domestic home to STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and the upcoming STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS and STAR TREK: PICARD featuring Sir Patrick Stewart. CBS All Access also includes the ability to stream CBS Interactive's other live channels, CBSN for 24/7 news, CBS Sports HQ for sports news and analysis, and ET Live for entertainment coverage.

The service is currently available online at CBS.com, on mobile devices via the CBS app for iOS and Android, and on Roku Players, Apple TV, Chromecast, Android TV, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Fire TV, Samsung Smart TVs, Vizio Smartcast TVs, Amazon Prime Video Channels and Apple TV channels. Versions of CBS All Access have now launched internationally in Canada and Australia (10 All Access), with unique but similar content and pricing plans. For more details on CBS All Access, please visit https://www.cbs.com/all-access.

About DreamWorks Animation:

DreamWorks Animation (DWA), a division of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, within NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, is a global family entertainment company with feature film and television brands. The company's deep portfolio of intellectual property is supported by a robust, worldwide consumer products practice, which includes licensing, and location-based entertainment venues around the world. DWA's feature film heritage includes many of the world's most beloved characters and franchises, including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Trolls and The Boss Baby, and have amassed more than $15 billion in global box office receipts. DreamWorks Animation's television business has quickly become one of the world's leading producers of high-quality, animated family programming, reaching consumers in more than 190 countries. Creating a diverse array of original content in a variety of formats and delivering deep, fully immersive worlds served up with compelling characters, the prolific studio has garnered 25 Emmy? Awards since inception in 2013.

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From TheWrap:

CBS All Access, Showtime Pass 10 Million Combined Subscribers

TCA 2020: CBS expects to have 25 million combined by 2022

CBS All Access and Showtime’s OTT service now count more than 10 million subscribers between the two of them, Marc DeBevoise, CEO of CBS Interactive, said on Sunday.

That is up from the 8 million between the two the last time CBS reported subscriber numbers. CBS expects to have a combined 25 million subs by 2022.

The subscription streaming product, initially a way for non-TV subscribers to watch the CBS broadcast network, as well as the network’s catalog of shows like “The Brady Bunch” and “I Love Lucy,” debuted the day after HBO made its own announcement that it would also jump into the streaming space with HBO Now.

CBS All Access, now a subsidiary of ViacomCBS, is part of a multi-pronged streaming strategy which runs counter to other streaming competitors in the space.

ViacomCBS plans to keep its to main streaming offering separate, pollinating CBS All Access with content from Viacom networks like MTV and Nickelodeon while also beefing up its Showtime streaming service with Viacom’s Paramount films. In addition, the company has its supported streamer Pluto TV, the kids-oriented subscription service Noggin and BET+.

In the months to come, Quibi, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and HBO Max will hit the market, as well. Last November, both Apple and Disney launched their own direct-to-consumer products.

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From Deadline:

CBS All Access Chiefs Give Update On Subscriber Figures, Viacom Programming Plans & Broad Content Strategy – TCA

CBS has added 2M subscribers to its CBS All Access and Showtime streaming services in the last twelve months.

The broadcaster revealed the new subscribers figures as part of a general update on the digital service as part of Marc DeBevoise and Julie McNamara’s exec session at the Winter TCA Press Tour.

The pair also discussed the company’s plans to move over some Viacom content to the service following its merger and discussed original programming plans, including a hint at a potential move towards gameshows.

Marc DeBevoise, Chief Digital Officer, ViacomCBS, and President and CEO, CBS Interactive, said the company has continued on its “incredible growth path” and said it was still on target to reach 25M subscribers for CBS All Access and Showtime by 2022. He also added that it had seen around 80% growth in terms of overall streams and said he was happy with its position in the market following the launch of rival services such as Apple TV+ and Disney+. “There’s been a lot of talk about what the new entrants to the streaming space would mean to the overall marketplace. We have always looked at the so-called streaming wars as anything but a zero-sum game and consumer behaviour has continued to prove that,” he said.

He also said that there “were lots of opportunities going forward” in terms of adding Viacom content to CBS All Access. This comes after it revealed it was “loading up” on a number of kids titles from Nickelodeon. “We’re in the middle of talking through those all of those pieces,” he said. “We’ve already started to dabble and there will be a lot more that we can discuss in the future. We’re evaluating those things over time. We view it as a much larger content portfolio.”

Julie McNamara, Executive Vice President of Original Content for CBS All Access, unveiled a number of new originals during her session including animated series Tooning Out The News and The Harper House as well as an animal rescue docuseries from Richard Linklater and a second season of Star Trek spin-off Picard. “Are there other genres [that CBS All Access could move into]?,” she asked. “Maybe gameshows. There’s been a lot of gameshows this week. We’re definitely open and are very happy with how our brand is evolving.”

McNamara added that she wanted to keep its originals strategy broad. “I tend to not to get too philosophically dug in [but] we do have a sense, that it’s a great space to be in. It’s a premium service that puts all of the resources that can speak to a broad audience, it’s not designed to be particularly niche or indie and that taps back to the brand of our corporation. It’s not a dirty word to say something is going to be commercial.”

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From Variety:

CBS All Access, Showtime OTT Reach 10 Million Collective Subscribers

ViacomCBS-owned streaming services CBS All Access and Showtime OTT have reached a collective 10 million subscribers, said ViacomCBS chief digital officer and CBS Interactive chief exec Marc DeBevoise at the Television Critics Assn. winter press tour. That’s up from 8 million at last update.

“We’re in a great position to hit our goals of 25 million subscribers by 2022,” he said, adding that subscribers have been growing at a 60% rate, year over year.

Original series are a key driver for subscriber growth and viewer retention at All Access, which encompasses scripted and unscripted originals, live news, sports, entertainment, and local affiliate programming. The service also recently expanded into children’s content, announcing at TCA the orders of “Mr. Magoo,” “George of the Jungle” and “Lassie” reboots.

All Access’ kids-programming worldview — to draw in the children of subscribers, who are an average of 44 years old — may evolve now that it is under the newly reunified ViacomCBS banner.

“This is the beginning, and now with the merger of ViacomCBS, we may have an entirely different point of view,” said DeBevoise. “These deals were processed before the merger. We’re now at the point where the merger will help us refine our thinking about the kids strategy with the Nickelodeon brand. We can see what we have there.”

Attrition is in the single digits, similar to that of other premium streaming services, said DeBevoise.

“We’ve decreased churn each year since starting the service, so we feel really good about the trend line,” the ViacomCBS exec told the reporters and critics in the room.

Echoing many of his executive peers at other subscription video on-demand services, DeBevoise believes that the so-called streaming wars are not a zero-sum game. The launch of new services will not lead to negative impact on growth, and may in fact may help to grow the market overall, he said.

All Access ad revenue has grown in tandem with subscribers. Around two-thirds of subscribers have the limited-commercial version of the streamer, with the other third paying for the ad-free platform.

When asked about the impact of Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus and other new entrants to the streaming market have impacted CBS All Access, DeBevoise and All Access originals chief Julie McNamara were bullish on the appeal of the streamer, which includes both library and live streaming programming.

“The diversity of our service of the types of programming — the nature of live and on demand, library and current, different genres — I think that’s pretty unique,” said DeBevoise.

“It fundamentally comes down to the value proposition, the ecosystem you’re providing, and then [offering] shows people want to see badly enough that they come and find you,” added McNamara. “I think we’ve seen with other services, the kind of pro and con of how that works, and you’ve got to have the creative confidence and keep going out there with shows people want to see, and I do believe that most consumers out there will follow their hearts, to some extent, in terms of the content being really desirable for them.”

And amid SVODs that may angle for premium HBO-style programming, All Access is courting a broader audience.

“We have a strong sense and we have looked at data to inform our thinking of this,” said McNamara, later adding, “I think that does tap back to the brand of our corporation overall, that it’s not a dirty word to say that something is potentially going to be commercial.”

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From Variety:

CBS’ David Nevins on New Boss George Cheeks, the ViacomCBS Merger So Far and Kobe Bryant

David Nevins, Michael Schneider. David Nevins, Chief Creative Officer, CBS Corporation, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Showtime Networks Inc., and Michael Schneider, not pictured, Senior Editor, TV Awards, Variety, engage in provocative, insightful conversation for the Television Academy's "Industry Architects: a Dialogue with David Nevins," the third in a series of provocative conversations presented by the Academy's Council of Former Chairs on at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los AngelesIndustry Architects: A Dialogue with David Nevins, Beverly Hills, USA - 30 Jan 2020 CREDIT: DANNY MOLOSHOK/INVISION/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

CBS chief creative officer David Nevins expects a “natural transition” over the next few months as George Cheeks takes over as president and CEO of CBS Entertainment Group and outgoing acting CEO Joe Ianniello departs the company.

“I’ve known George and I think he and I will work really well together,” Nevins told Variety on Friday morning at a panel held by the Television Academy and its Council of Former Chairs. “We’ve never worked together, but we have a mutual close friend in common. He’s really smart and a good guy, and he’s going to be a good unifier… I feel really good about it.”

As for Ianniello, who took over CBS after Leslie Moonves was removed from the company in 2018, Nevins lauded the exec for his tenure: “He took over CBS under difficult circumstances, and did a great job in stabilizing and bringing the company together, and then getting [the CBS-Viacom merger] done, which had many starts and stops.”

Ianniello had been chief operating officer of CBS since 2013, but had limited programming experience, which is why he elevated Nevins to focus on the company’s creative side. Besides continuing to oversee Showtime, Nevins now provides creative oversight across CBS assets, including CBS, CBS TV Studios and CBS All Access. “This job didn’t exist at CBS in the old regime, where there were a lot of spokes off a central hub,” he said. “And it’s really helpful as these organizations get larger and more complicated.”

Asked to give a report on ViacomCBS, which officially re-merged in December, Nevins said the combined company is still “in early innings. We’re two months in, and I think it is definitely going to be one company. It’s already working that way. It’s going to roll out in the course of the year in terms of what our approach to the market is, what our consumer approach is. Any concern that these companies weren’t going to meld and that they’d run the way they did last time they were together — which was really as two separate [entities] — I think that it’s really clear it’s not going to be that way [this time].”

Nevins pointed to a new content council, which he said “is working quite well so far.” Early synergies include airings of “Star Trek: Picard” on Pluto TV, Nickelodeon fare on CBS All Access and repeats of “The Late Late Show With James Corden” on Comedy Central.

“We have so many different platforms from MTV.com to Paramount Pictures to the CW to CBS and Showtime, to make sure that people are talking to each other,” he said. “Talent can go where they want to go, and we can figure out the best platform for any particular idea. We feel like at ViacomCBS, one of our great competitive advantages is the fact that we have a lot of attractive platforms, not one thing. Is it a young adult show for The CW, or is it better for streaming and All Access? Helping to make those decisions and helping to make sure that everybody is coordinated in a way that even in the smaller CBS of old, where it was really Showtime/CBS/CW, those things never connected. Now they’re connecting in a big way. Everybody is dealing with each other.”

At the same time, Nevins said it’s important to maintain the distinctiveness of the brands inside the company. “Nickelodeon, Showtime, BET, they all mean something,” he said. “So the goal is not to have some uber ViacomCBS brand, it’s a collection of brands. And making sure that as we make this transition from a bundled MVPD world to a less bundled — but probably rebundled — more broadband-driven world, how do you preserve the strength of those brands but also make sure that they connect to each other?”

Nevins said his priorities now are to figure out ways the company as a whole can acquire “big, important intellectual properties” and attract major talent, while also figuring out what its content play ultimately will be.

“It’s clear what we’re already doing in the OTT space, in the broadband space, but that strategy is going to evolve,” he said. “And so we need to evolve in a way that preserves the strengths of our brands, our company but then sets us up for the next epoch of how media is delivered.”

For now, ViacomCBS has been both selling content to other platforms (such as its $500 million “South Park” deal with HBO Max) while also growing OTT platforms like CBS All Access. Nevins calls it a “walking and chewing gum at the same time” strategy, which still holds.

“In a big company you have to deal with complexity and there’s not one black or white,” he said. “We’re going to hold it all or we’re going to sell it all. The truth is every large media company is going to do some degree of exploiting it on their own platforms and some degree of selling it to other people’s platforms. I still believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time.” But, he added, it’s up to ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish to share what the company’s strategy will ultimately look like.

One in-house streaming property that Nevins is particularly proud of is the recent launch of “Picard,” which he said is now CBS All Access’ biggest debut ever. (The streamer has said “Picard” set a new record for total streams, up more than 115% over previous record holder “Star Trek: Discovery,” but hasn’t shared specific numbers.)

“I’m thrilled with the rollout and acceptance of ‘Picard,'” Nevins said. As for the growing world of “Star Trek” in general, “I think it’s been well handled, the slow roll out and expansion of the universe, in different kinds of shows. One of the issues is how TV and movies will co-exist and we’re working on that. It’s much easier now that we’re all together, there’s a lot of good communication and creative coordination.”

Meanwhile, Nevins paid tribute to late CBS/ABC/NBC entertainment leader Fred Silverman, who died Thursday: “A lot of us owe a great debt to Fred Silverman, who invented so many of the practices in the way networks still operate. He had an incredible career.”

And Nevins also discussed his relationship with late basketball great Kobe Bryant, who produced the documentary “Kobe Bryant’s Muse” for Showtime. Nevins recalled how Bryant’s involvement grew on the project, and the star’s interest in becoming a media mogul after retiring from the Los Angeles Lakers.

“We had a couple of dinners where he would just ask me every detail about how the business works,” Nevins said. “The kinds of things we’re talking about now. He started watching Showtime because he wanted to be able to ask me questions about Showtime — about the development of ‘Ray Donovan’ and ‘Homeland.'”

Nevins said Bryant, who ultimately won an Oscar for his “Dear Basketball” short, “was real [in producing] in the same way that he was on the basketball court: super attention to detail, he really wanted to understand the process, wanted to break down the process. [His death] was hard to process.”

At the Grammy Awards, which aired on CBS this Sunday just hours after Bryant’s death, Nevins was there and watched as producers Ken Ehrlich and Ben Winston reworked the show’s open with host Alicia Keys.

“Watching the two of them, with a few writers and Alicia, rework how they were going to open the show, what they were going to say, and how they were going to handle it on the fly was really the best of live television,” Nevins said. “It was an amazing thing to see. The goal all along with the Grammys this year was to increase the level of jaw-dropping talent and performance, which I think they accomplished. And the other goal was real human emotion. There’s something about the Grammys where because it’s music and more performance-based, you can get more genuine human emotion. They were already going down that path. I think the way Alicia handled it and the way that a number of other people that night handled it was really raw in the way that’s rare in this day and age.”

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More Nick: Nickelodeon and CBS Television Studios Announce New Animated 'Star Trek' Series!

Originally published: Tuesday, January 7, 2020 at 19:33 GMT.

H/T: Anime Superhero Forum /@BillK15; Additional sources: YouTube /@SpongebobFanguy6660 Inc. /The VHS Guy, Wikipedia.

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