Just days after Skydance closed its $8.4 billion merger with Paramount, the newly reconfigured media giant has closed out a rights deal that should position its streaming service for a massive spike in paid subscribers.
David Ellison’s Paramount has inked an exclusive seven-year, $7.7 billion deal with TKO’s UFC, one that will see all 13 marquee numbered events and each of the 30 weekend “Fight Night” cards stream on Paramount+. Under the terms of the agreement, select outings will be simulcast on the broadcast TV flagship CBS.
In addition to aligning Paramount with one of sports’ youngest-skewing fan bases, the deal should go a long way toward beefing up the company’s streaming engine. Paramount+ closed out the second quarter of 2025 with 77.7 million subscribers, which represented a sequential loss of 1.3 million customers. During its earnings call last week, Paramount attributed the quarter-to-quarter decline to the expiration of a hard-bundle deal in an unspecified international market.
Paramount+ is chugging along in the middle of the streaming pack, but the service should start gaining on the field once the UFC inventory kicks in next year. While the platform is a good stretch of road ahead of NBCUniversal’s Peacock, which closed out the quarter at 41 million subs, and is well out of reach of ESPN+ (24.1 million as of June 28), Paramount+ trails the top tier by a significant margin. Disney+ closed out the quarter with 127.8 million global subs, of which 57.8 million were situated in the U.S. and Canada, while Warner Bros. Discovery last week indicated that HBO Max would “reach over 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026.”
By way of comparison with the rank and file, Amazon’s Prime Video boasts north of 200 million customers around the world—which puts it a good 100 million subs shy of leader Netflix. While Netflix is no longer reporting its quarterly subscription figures, it closed out its final official reckoning in Q4 2024 with a category-topping 301.6 million sign-ups.
Per Nielsen, Paramount+ accounted for 2% of all U.S. video consumption in June, edging Peacock at 1.5% and the WBD streamers (1.4%). Prime Video finished the month with a 3.6% share of video, while Disney+ claimed a 4.8% share and Netflix took 8.3%. Beating all comers in the streaming space was YouTube, with a 12.8% share of video. By way of comparison, broadcast TV as a whole accounted for 18.5% of video consumption during the month. June marked the first time network TV consumption dropped below a 20% share.
Thus far, Paramount+ has made its biggest splash with original drama series like Yellowstone, Landman and 1923, all of which were created by Taylor Sheridan. A prequel to Yellowstone, 1923 ranked as the sixth most-streamed original show in the first half of 2025, with 8.54 million minutes viewed. Landman was No. 10 with 7.83 million minutes logged. All told, Paramount+ boasted its greatest success in the first six months of the year with the animated juggernaut SpongeBob SquarePants, which was streaming’s sixth-biggest draw with 16.7 million minutes viewed.
The NFL accounts for the lion’s share of the Paramount+ sports traffic, as the platform notched its biggest single-day viewership with its simulcast of Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11, 2024. The 49ers-Chiefs game held the bragging rights as the most-streamed NFL title tilt for exactly one year, before Fox and Tubi unseated it with Super Bowl LIX.
Word that Paramount was circling a UFC deal began heating up in the weeks before the Skydance merger closed, talk that intensified with the unveiling of the company’s new management team. (Tongues first started wagging after Ellison was spotted ringside in Miami for the April UFC card, where he was a guest of TKO CEO Ari Emanuel.) Among the heavy hitters in the Paramount C-suite include RedBird Capital Partners’ Andy Gordon, who now serves as chief strategy officer and COO, and former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell, who oversees day-to-day operations as president.
RedBird has an estimated $2 billion stake in the new entity, which now trades under the ticker symbol PSKY. RedBird holds 22.5% of Paramount’s voting rights, while Ellison holds 50%. The remainder is controlled by Ellison’s father, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.
Under Gerry Cardinale, the RedBird portfolio is teeming with high-octane sports properties. In 2022, Cardinale’s firm acquired the Serie A club AC Milan in a $1.3 billion deal, a big move that closed the year after RedBird picked up an 11% stake in Fenway Sports Group, the holding company behind MLB’s Boston Red Sox and the club’s regional sports network, NESN, as well as Premier League giant Liverpool FC.
The new UFC deal will run from 2026 through 2032, and while the rights fee averages out to some $1.1 billion per year, the payments will be weighted more toward the back end of the span. All told, Paramount’s annual payout is twice as rich as the $550 million that ESPN currently pays for its UFC rights package.
Paramount said it aims to pursue UFC’s rights in territories outside the U.S. as they become available.
In pre-noon trading Monday, TKO shares rose 8.07% to $176.47. PSKY shares were down 0.90% at $10.42.
