CBS Sports, the company that moved Paramount from the Hollywood Hills to world sports. audiovisual group was born when the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) decided to open a channel dedicated to sports broadcasting in 1955betting in its beginnings on competitions such as the National Football League or the 1960 Rome Olympic Games. Since then, it has accumulated decades of television career, until it became the holder of the majority of sports rights in the United States.
During its first decades on the air, CBS Sports dedicated itself to broadcasting local competitions on the American television grid such as the PGA Tour, Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Hockey League (NHL) or the United States Tennis Open. A long period in traditional television without many innovations, the chain was being relegated and lost sports rights. The coup d’état for CBS did not come until 2002 when the company launched the pay and cable platform CBS Sports Network, a space from which to redouble its commitment to live sports and gain a foothold among the main sports rights holders.
In 2021, Paramount drew up a business plan to continue increasing its commitment to sports and revealed that the objective for the period 2021-2025 was to broadcast more than a thousand sporting events livedisburse up to 5,000 million dollars and attract between 65 and 75 million new subscribers.
Paramount is the majority shareholder of CBS since 1929, when the channel led the radio broadcasts in the United States. In 1994, the year in which Paramount was absorbed by ViacomCBS, one of the studios that had changed the history of cinema and communication, it lost its name. However, in 2022, the company has reverted to its original nomenclature: Paramount Global.
CBS Sports plans to invest 5,000 million between 2021-2025 to increase its portfolio of rights
One One of the company’s latest moves was the acquisition of the rights to the Champions League in the United States, for which it will disburse 1,500 million dollars in six years. The matches will be broadcast on both CBS Sports and the streaming platform. stream Paramount+.
The new bets do not separate the company from its fundamentals and it continues with the transmission of the different university competitions. In fact, en 2006, the company launched over a hundred channels solely dedicated to college sports, which broadcast more than 10,000 live events. The subscription service, called CBS College Sports, includes National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) matches.
In addition to the university channel, CBS has six more subsidiary channels: CBS Sports Digital, which brings together the main American and European competitions; CBS Sports HQ, sports news channel; 247Sports, a chain premium aimed at reporting college sports and SportsLive, an additional subscription service with even more sports rights.
In 2006, the company launched CBS College Sports, a service that broadcasts more than 10,000 college events.
As of 2019, Paramount has been led by Robert M. Bakish, who was previously Chairman of Viacom for nearly twenty years. The president of CBS Sports, meanwhile, is David Bersonwho began and developed his career at Espn for more than fifteen years.
Although Paramount does not break down the results of CBS Sports, the division to which it belongs, CBS Entertainment Group, closed the year 2021, the last year with all the accounts available, with revenues of 1,950 million dollars.
The largest shareholder of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, is The Vanguard Group, which owns 12% of the company. They are followed by Norges Bank Investment Management, with 9% of the shares and the BlackRock fund, with 6.7% ownership.
