Showtime’s sports department to shut down at the end of 2023

[CoopInTheHouse 63]

Paramount Global announced just over a week ago that Showtime’s sports division will shut down at the end of 2023, meaning that all sports content within the company, and any content that may air on Showtime will be expected to be produced by CBS Sports beginning in 2024. Showtime Sports launched in 1986 and has been known for its coverage of boxing (primarily under the Showtime Championship Boxing and ShoBox: The New Generation banners) and mixed martial arts (namely the Bellator MMA promotion) on both the Showtime network and pay-per-view.

[TVLurker 160]

HBO getting out of sports predicted this, this is sad.

[T.L. Hughes 746]

On 10/25/2023 at 4:23 PM, CoopInTheHouse said:

Paramount Global announced just over a week ago that Showtime’s sports division will shut down at the end of 2023, meaning that all sports content within the company, and any content that may air on Showtime will be expected to be produced by CBS Sports beginning in 2024.

I don’t think that CBS Sports will produce any sports content for Showtime, at least not live sports events. This was structured as a total elimination of the Showtime Sports unit, rather than a consolidation of operations with CBS Sports (a la the 2006 merger of ABC Sports and ESPN into one unit, which came after earlier streamlining of certain staffs between the two divisions in the years following Disney’s purchase of ABC’s assets), so if the company really was intending to continue offering sports content on Showtime, all of those responsibilities would’ve been transferred to CBS Sports. Since Paramount didn’t qualify that it would, reports that mention this come off looking like drumming up false hope that boxing, MMA and docs would still be around from 2024 onwards.

 

This doubt is buttressed by the fact that Premier Boxing Champions is reportedly looking at deals with Prime Video and DAZN, and Paramount is looking to offload Bellator, which hasn’t had a stable broadcast home since Viacom/ViacomCBS/Paramount bought it (it got bounced between Epix (now MGM+), MTV2 and Spike/Paramount Network and DAZN, before landing on Showtime). Some have blamed PBC’s management, citing it hasn’t been able to keep a stable broadcast home in its ten-year history (having carried events on multiple networks—with NBC/NBCSN, Spike, CBS/CBS Sports Network and Bounce TV, later joined by Fox Sports and ESPN—for its first few years, then moving to Showtime and Fox Sports in 2018, only to lose its deal with the latter by 2021), and suggesting its fight choices and purse amounts valued over fighters’ actual valuation made it not worth continuing with the deal). (The sports documentary unit is also being cut, meaning that all sports-focused series are effectively being canceled.)

 

The company’s decision to cut Showtime Sports also likely has to deal with the fact that Paramount’s valuation has dropped from around $20 billion at the time of the 2019 merger to $8 billion today, resulting in layoffs and staff restructuring over the past year (Showtime Networks was folded into the MTV Entertainment Networks unit earlier in the year, as part of that operational streamlining). The company is struggling to make a profit on Paramount+ (though adding PPV events through the Showtime tier could have helped create additional revenue to some extent), and it’s losing retrans dollars because of cord-cutting.

Edited October 28, 2023 by T.L. Hughes