Charter and ViacomCBS reached a new licensing agreement which covers broadcast and cable channels along with ViacomCBS’s streaming services.
The cable provider said it now has rights to Paramount+, Pluto TV, BET+ and Noggin, for future distribution to Spectrum customers.
“These comprehensive agreements with ViacomCBS recognize the fast-changing pace of the subscription video business and provide us the flexibilities to adapt for the benefit of our customers while also furthering our strategic interests in the advanced advertising realm and aggregated video store concept with the addition of the streaming apps,” said Tom Montemagno, executive vice president of programming acquisition for Charter, in a statement.
This idea of an aggregated video store is one that Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has been talking about for months. The company is continuing to embrace the traditional channel bundle but also look at other options for selling video.
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In January, Rutledge said that Charter would like to operate “a transactional marketplace on a consumer-friendly interface so that a customer of ours has access to all the products they may want to buy that are direct-to-consumer.”
He also said that Worldbox—Charter’s next-gen set-top box—is deployed to multiple millions of households and that the provider is planning to launch several third-party streaming apps on those set-top boxes.
“We have the opportunity to offer an app-based platform to our data-only customers. We haven’t offered that IP-only product although we’ve opened up some of our video products through apps to our internet-only customer base, like our news channels for instance,” he said.
ViacomCBS and Charter also agreed to expand their existing collaboration around addressable media and advanced advertising. Earlier this month, Blockgraph—a TV advertising tech initiative that’s co-owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal, Charter and ViacomCBS—contributed alongside TVSquared to a new cross-platform attribution solution from Spectrum Reach, Charter’s advertising sales business. In April, Blockgraph said it will begin using TransUnion’s identity and data-based audience solutions including data modeling, audience creation and activation. Blockgraph will also get access to data marketplace applications Tru Optik, which TransUnion acquired in October.