Paramount Global, which is in the midst of corporate upheaval on a number of fronts, got a slight reprieve in one key area, extending carriage negotiations with Charter Communications.
In just the past 48 hours, the media company has seen the exit of CEO Bob Bakish, the closely watched release of first-quarter earnings and a revised acquisition offer from Skydance Media.
The expiration of the current agreement between the companies was set to expire Tuesday at midnight. The extension of talks was confirmed to Deadline by sources familiar with the negotiations. It was unclear if there would be a firm revised deadline put in place, but talks are ongoing. No on-screen crawls or ominous email warnings to customers have yet been deployed, signaling that the parties are aiming to reach a settlement without fireworks – at least as of now.
A lot is at stake for both companies. Charter, which operates the Spectrum pay-TV and broadband brand, recently leapfrogged Comcast to become the No. 1 pay-TV operator in the U.S. Wall Street analysts as well as participants in an expected M&A transaction are paying close attention to the Charter talks and the company’s transitory state has made an outage on Charter unthinkable.
The Stamford, CT-based company last August didn’t hesitate to take advantage of its scale. It wound up gaining the upper hand in a widely tracked dispute with Disney, which unfolded at a key time as U.S. Open tennis and college football was airing on ESPN and local ABC stations. The 10-day blackout that resulted left millions of customers in the dark and by the end of the showdown, the deal reached by the parties established a new template for pay-TV providers. Charter dropped major networks like Freeform and others from its linear systems, instead offering to integrate and promote streaming services to its customers.
Charter CEO Chris Winfrey and other execs have indicated that they do not plan on pulling back the throttle as they embark on distribution talks with other companies. Their mantra is to not let programmers charge customers twice for programming. That could leave many of Paramount’s general entertainment networks in a tricky position given how many of their titles stream on Paramount+ (whose lowest tier is one of the least expensive on the streaming market) in addition to airing on linear.
One element that could play in Paramount’s favor is the timing of the end of the current deal. While there’s never an optimal time for carriage drama, the next several weeks will not bring anything comparable to the Disney corridor when its networks went dark. NFL football, maybe the brightest jewel in Paramount’s crown, is four months away from kickoff.