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Paramount+ Paramount+ Streaming Service (Formerly CBS All Access) (2 Viewers)

Cranston37+

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https://deadline.com/2019/08/cbs-viacom-merger-deal-done-details-1202665588/

"The transaction combines assets of the 92-year-old CBS, including its flagship broadcast network, local TV stations, premium network Showtime and publishing house Simon & Schuster, with Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, MTV and Nickelodeon. As the streaming wars intensify between traditional media and tech giants Netflix and Amazon, the combined CBS-Viacom offers a notable mix of subscription and advertising-supported streaming services."

"The merged company will have a library of 3,600 film titles and 140,000 TV episodes, an important set of assets as CBS All Access and Showtime OTT battle with Netflix and others and as Viacom's PlutoTV gears up to do the same.

The new ViacomCBS will also boast of a 22 percent share of the U.S. television audience, larger than Comcast, Disney, Fox Corporation, or WarnerMedia."
 
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Cranston37+

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I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the "dead service walking" call, when there was no service announced at all, might have set a HTF record for an overly pre-mature reaction.

Although I nonetheless think there will be about 17 posts calling the non-existent service too expensive...
 
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Josh Steinberg

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CBS All Access isn’t dead. Presumably this would ultimately wind up building on that platform. CBS is the most watched broadcast network. They’re probably in a better position to leverage a streaming service than any other broadcast network.
 

Cranston37+

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You have to wonder how long it will be before somebody snaps up MGM. They can't possibly stand on their own in this new landscape.
 

Chip_HT

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I was only getting slightly annoyed at the copy errors in that story, but then there was this little nugget at the end:

The Paramount library also includes the powerhouse Transformers franchise (with six feature films to date and close to $5 billion in worldwide box office) as well as major-league animated properties from DreamWorks (Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda)

DreamWorks Animation is with Universal now, and separate from the non-animated DreamWorks.
 

B-ROLL

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You have to wonder how long it will be before somebody snaps up MGM. They can't possibly stand on their own in this new landscape.
Um somebody did ... they're called SONY ... Fox only distributes and licenses MGM titles (for now) ...
image613164x.jpg
 

MatthewA

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Viacom only existed in the first place because of the FCC's now-repealed rules about networks owning syndicated programs while Paramount had some false starts in TV before buying Desilu and making it into their TV unit.

MGM is another story altogether. A once-great studio, Hollywood's original lion king, hanging on by a thread but hanging onto that thread for decades. They lost its own library to Ted Turner, so they made up for it by snapping up as many bankrupt indies as they could. It should be owned by Warner Bros. and not a bunch of creditors, but that would also give them everything they've acquired along the way.

This is just cleaning up the mess Les Moonves left behind. You want to see another example of his "legacy," go read the thread about Knots Landing in the TV on DVD section. The bad things they talk about happened under his watch when he worked at Lorimar before WB bought them and he moved from there to CBS.
 
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GlennC

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I have just taken out a trial 7 day subscription via Amazon.

I am really glad I did because I am definitely not impressed.

I fail to understand why they are streaming series which have HD masters in SD. A prime example is MacGyver (the original series). The picture quality is atrocious; I realize is had always been poor but since season 1 has already been released on BluRay (and the whole series is due on BluRay this year in Germany) I don't understand why CBS are not making use of the HD version.

I would have thought a good selling point for CBS All Access would be the only place to see the series in HD.

There must be a lot of old series that could be streamed in that way.

Jag is advertised on Amazon prime as "season 6" available on CBS All Access. Well this is a joke as there are only four episodes available including part one of a two part story. Most of the other seasons tell a similar story.

I guess the problem is that "classic TV" is not seen by them to have much value and is used as filler.

Perhaps it is just as well I bought the DVDs and Season 1 BluRay in the case of MacGyver.

I will be cancelling my subscription before the trial runs out.
 

Bryan^H

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Yeah, I couldn't say why they treat their classic TV the way they do especially considering they have such an extensive library of it.

I tried watching a couple episodes of The Brady Bunch, and man oh man I'm not sure where they dug those quality episodes from but they are pitiful. I threw in one of my DVD sets to remedy the bad image I witnessed. Their new shows Like Discovery, and Picard look fantastic.
 
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Josh Steinberg

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I think there are a few things going on:

-A lot of CBS-owned properties have been licensed to other networks and services for fixed periods of time that are still underway. It’s gonna take a little time for the rights to everything to revert back to CBS.

-For a lot of the older shows, the most available masters are older ones used for DVD, which may have been much older than that to begin with.

-I’ve noticed that streaming codecs can sometimes have a lot of difficulty with older standard definition masters and they can end up appearing worse than the DVD versions (the MPEG2 codec used on DVD seemed to handle these better).

-Sometimes there are settings in your streaming device buried deep in the settings menu which can affect how material like this looks, and by default it can be switched to a setting that doesn’t yield the best result. It can be the result of the shows being shot on film at 24 frames a second, but then are transferred to tape converted to 30 frames a second, and then digitized from the tape rather than the film. And I think depending on how that’s encoded and how your settings are adjusted, it can throw off how the streaming boxes are displaying that image.
 

Todd Erwin

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A prime example is MacGyver (the original series). The picture quality is atrocious;
MacGyver was shot on film but all effects were composited on standard def video tape, which sadly was standard practice back in the 1980s. I have the full series on DVD, and even they look absolutely horrible on both of my UHD displays.
 

SwainFlu

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I just stumbled on this thread trying to fix the same problem. I'm watching Star Trek on Xbox One with the CBS app. It only plays in stereo. I have checked the settings of both the app and Xbox. I get 5.1 in Netflix as well as my own local files so it's definitely CBS's issue
 

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