In its final earnings call before David Ellison’s Skydance Media closes its $8 billion takeover of Paramount, the parent company of the CBS broadcast flagship did not open the floor to queries from analysts. Instead, a clutch of senior executives offered a somewhat compact summary of the company’s second-quarter financial performance.
But before co-CEOs Chris McCarthy, George Cheeks and Brian Robbins ran through the Q2 highlight reel, non-executive chair Shari Redstone offered a valediction to the media empire her father cobbled together via a leveraged buyout of Viacom in 1987 and the subsequent acquisition of CBS at the turn of the century.
“I believe I can take it on faith that many on this call understand the enormous importance of this business to my family and to me,” Redstone said on the Thursday afternoon call. “While people often debated whether content or distribution ruled the day, my father’s steadfast belief was that content was king, and even against the backdrop of enormous change, that core philosophy remains the reality of our industry.”
Sumner Redstone adopted the phrase “content is king” as his mantra in the mid-1990s, at a time when distribution was in its ascendancy and the stuff flowing through the pipes was considered by many to be of lesser significance than the conduits themselves.
“While it is never easy to step away, please know that it has been an honor, for my family and for me, to serve as stewards of these assets for decades,” his daughter said before turning the call over to McCarthy.
The playback of Paramount’s April-June quarter was brief, clocking in at 20 minutes. Paramount posted $6.85 billion in revenue for the period, up 1% versus Q2 2024, as a 15% boost in the direct-to-consumer segment helped offset a 6% decline at the TV networks. Sales at CBS and the cable networks came up $260 million shy of the year-ago quarter, as the linear properties took in $4.01 billion. TV advertising slipped 4% to $1.66 billion, while affiliate/subscription revenue dropped 7% to $1.78 billion.
Through June 30, Paramount’s 2025 TV sales were down 14% to $3.7 billion, while distribution dollars were off 8% to $3.61 billion.
Revenue at the DTC unit, on the other hand, was up by a factor of $280 million in the quarter, to $2.16 billion—this despite the fact that Paramount+ lost 1.3 million subscribers. Paramount chalked up the streaming subscriber declines to the expiration of a hard-bundle deal in an unspecified international market.
At the midway point of 2025, Paramount’s DTC segment had generated $4.2 billion in revenue, up 12% versus the analogous period a year ago.
“The next chapter for Paramount is sure to be another historic one,” McCarthy said before signing off. He then gave a nod to the company’s onboarding owners, telling members of the Skydance team, “We are excited to see what you do, and you have a great team here to help you.”
In keeping with a longstanding practice, Paramount serenaded its earnings auditors with a loop of the NFL on CBS theme song before the call kicked off at 4:30 p.m. ET.
Skydance’s acquisition of the company is slated to close on Aug. 7.
