Paramount Plus is still figuring out Paramount Plus

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Yesterday was the first birthday of Paramount Plus. The first year of the service included the debut of a SpongeBob movie, the addition of original shows like 1884 and the second season of Evil, which was originally a CBS show. The highly anticipated live-action Halo series was swiped by Paramount Plus from sister service Showtime.

Paramount Plus has yet to prove why we should care about it beyond its Star Trek catalog and obsession with Yellowstone, a year after its launch. It seems as though Paramount has struggled to find a balance between investing in its tentpole streaming service and keeping its existing business.

I think they are afraid of making hard choices. That is the thing that sticks with me, according to Andrew A. Rosen, the founder of PARQOR.

Many of those questions are about Paramount Plus, a kind of anti-Netflix approach. The service promised to bring all of Paramount's assets under a single roof when it was rebranded from CBS All Access. Live sports, live news and entertainment, and a lot of other programming from a lot of different places.

Some of the Paramount content that should have driven viewers to the service hasn't been available to stream. South Park, for example, currently lives on HBO Max after the streamer won a bidding war for the series just over two years ago. New episodes of the popular Paramount title, Yellowstone, can be seen on the Paramount Network cable channel.

At least, that's what the chief programming officer of streaming at Paramount said recently. She told Deadline that the solution to creating a broad universe of Yellowstone was to bring the prequel to the show, 1884, exclusively to Paramount.

Paramount Plus is in a bind. It has had a few grabby names to date, like Star Trek and SpongeBob. The question is, where are the other flashy originals from Paramount Plus? Where is WandaVision?

Julia Alexander, a senior strategy analyst at Parrot, says they have one of the best libraries. Their high-acquisition titles are not in that location.

Paramount Plus has decades of crime procedurals, comedy, and kids programming, all of which is quite good, but it has yet to have its own Stranger Things moment. Alexander says that Paramount Plus needs to live on it in order to stay competitive and that it needs to have another show that can be the next Yellowstone.

The company seems to have realized that the content and licensing strategies it had in place when it launched Paramount Plus a year ago are no longer going to work if it wants to operate a successful streaming business. The company underwent a major executive restructure last summer, and Paramount boss Bob Bakish said during a recent earnings event that the company plans to claw back some of its older titles.

Paramount is starting to fix its flashy content problem. The service will debut a number of highly anticipated titles this month, including Star Trek: Picard and Halo; it also recently teased upcoming projects from Taylor Sheridan. The company introduced a bundle with Showtime last fall that costs $12 per month for essential and$15 per month for premium, which is a steal for two premium services that usually cost between $5 and $11 per month, respectively.

It will take some time. South Park won't be on the service until 2025, and it will take a while to get the appetite for more projects in the area. The service will have to rely on its back catalog and occasional big name until then.

They built something that is useful to fans of different types of content, and they have real audiences worldwide. To claim that they have a competitor to Netflix is an overstatement.

Paramount Plus is growing. On its most recent earnings call, the service reported over 30 million subscribers. In its first year, Disney Plus had 73 million subscribers. Alexander says it's too early to write Paramount Plus off, and that it could take anywhere from six to eight months to see the effects of Paramount's evolving business strategy.

Alexander thinks it's too early to discount Paramount Plus.

Paramount Plus has shown it has value in the streaming space even with a poor content strategy. It has to prove to us that it's worth it.