CBS Corporation

» see cbscorporation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There have been two companies called CBS Corporation and this is the second one. Viacom's board approved splitting the company in two on 14 June 2005, and the split took effect on 31 December of that year. One half kept the Viacom name and took the cable networks and the film studio. The other half took the CBS broadcast network along with the stations and the outdoor advertising business, plus the name CBS Corporation, and Leslie Moonves ran it.

The stated logic was that investors would value a slow-growing broadcast business and a fast-growing cable business more accurately if they were priced separately. For a while that held. By 2018 CBS Corporation was turning over $14.5 billion a year with something like 12,700 employees, and it had spent most of the decade as the most-watched network in the United States, which is a claim that depends on counting a lot of procedural dramas but is still a claim.

It ended on 4 December 2019, merged with the second Viacom into a company called ViacomCBS, later renamed Paramount Global. The corporate mechanics are the sort of thing that makes these deaths hard to file: CBS Corporation was the surviving legal entity, and it absorbed Viacom and then changed its own name. The company did not stop existing so much as stop being called this.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the split ~

Sumner Redstone drove the 2005 separation and his daughter Shari drove the 2019 reunion, which is the cleanest possible summary of what happened to this company. In between, the theory of the split quietly stopped being true. Streaming arrived and the relevant question stopped being whether a business grew slowly or quickly and became whether it had enough content to fill a subscription service, and on that measure both halves were too small on their own.

The reunion was attempted more than once before it worked. A 2016 approach and a 2018 attempt both collapsed, the second one partly over who would run the combined company and at what price, with the CBS board resisting hard enough that the fight became public and litigated.

~ the reunion ~

Moonves was gone before the deal closed. Allegations of sexual misconduct against him were published in July and August 2018 and he left the company in September, with CBS later declining to pay his $120 million severance. Strauss Zelnick came in as interim chairman and Joseph Ianniello as acting chief executive, and it was that caretaker leadership that agreed to the merger the previous management had blocked.

What the combined company got was scale that still was not enough. Paramount Global spent the first half of the 2020s as the subscale competitor in a market with Netflix and Disney in it, and by 2024 it was itself being sold to Skydance. The 2019 merger bought about five years.

~ what the name was worth ~

American network television is the clearest case of a thing I know entirely through its exports. What reached Turkey was the programming, dubbed or subtitled and often years late, with the network that paid for it invisible in the transaction. CSI was enormous here. I could not have told you in 2006 which company owned it, and the eye logo meant a production-company sting at the end of an episode rather than a corporation.

That is most of what a broadcast holding company's name is worth, and it explains why it was disposable. CBS as a network brand is nearly a century old and still in use. CBS Corporation as a corporate entity lasted fourteen years, and when it was worth more as half of a longer name, that is what it became.

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