Finally, after all these years, the last remaining streaming service in the pre-ViacomCBS years is going away.
BET+, the streaming service catered towards African Americans, is shutting down after 7 years of service. Launched in 2019 in partnership with Tyler Perry, the service was one of the few Viacom services to bring its shows to streaming.
Viacom’s strategy in the early days of streaming was, to say the least, the most fucked up way of downscaling their internet presence. They were one of the launch companies on Netflix before leaving in 2013, when Netflix decided to partner with Disney and DreamWorks (look where we are now). So they split their content that year between Hulu (current seasons roughly 2 weeks later) and Amazon Prime Video (a small library). Between 2016 and 2020, their content was either kept exclusive to their cable channels and VOD or distributed under small deals with Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, but without fanfare.
Alongside BET+ and the existing Noggin service (which relaunched in 2015), they launched Comedy Central Now, NickHits, MTV Hits, and Smithsonian Channel Plus. And once Viacom and CBS merged, they also assumed control of CBS All Access and Showtime standalone. By year 3 after the rebrand to Paramount+, every other service shut down, leaving it with just P+ and BET+ as its SVOD services after eliminating Showtime standalone.
What never made sense was the reason for keeping BET+ separate from P+ all these years, aside from Tyler Perry's stake in the service. And I’m not saying that to cause a stir or to push a political agenda here, do note I bleed red and blue, keep in mind.
Out of the many Paramount+ originals the service released, only 4 are/were Black-oriented. The two that stand out the most are the 2021 reboot of The Game (which was removed and added to The CW’s AVOD platform) and RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. The more likely fate of the former was due to a lack of promotion.
Just look at the BET hub as of right now. A few of the most popular series are not BET originals, and some have had most, if not all, of their seasons removed, leaving only one season available to watch. Plus, only four of their currently running BET shows are on Paramount+. I know P+ dipped its toes in adding BET+ to the service with The Ms. Pat Show for one month, but since launching Paramount+ and touting BET as a core brand to put the service on the map, it has been nothing but underwhelming in terms of content. Even with half-baked Sister, Sister and Moesha on the service (only Everybody Hates Chris had the best treatment because everybody loves hatewatching Chris), they never had the will to have other cult classic UPN shows on the service like The Parkers (spinoff of Moesha), One on One, and Girlfriends (in universe with both The Game series). Mind you, they were all licensed to Netflix.
Give them credit at least; this will finally give Paramount+ the variety it desperately needed to diversify its originals pipeline, with a good chunk of Tyler Perry shows and a few library titles that hadn’t been available or are now available again on Paramount+ (subject to licensing rights, of course). More importantly, it’s a test to see if they start adding more content from the cable networks faster to Paramount+ and not just from BET. Not only that, but BET+ has always been synergized with BET, airing the originals on the channel for a limited run, which Paramount should replicate more with its P+ originals on other networks. It also means the end of the old Viacom tech stack system (and P+’s CBS stack) that Ellison is trying to consolidate into a new platform run by Oracle.
I’ve seen some posts on X and YouTube on how it’s just the end of BET. To clear the air, BET has been mostly independent from the rest of Paramount and has been thriving on its own, to the point where they were second-guessing their decision to sell BET. I do think BET being more closely aligned with the rest of Paramount and aligning its business decisions while sharing its philosophies for handling its content will only help P+ grow, not deter the BET brand.
Getting rid of BET+, which has only 3.5M subs, and integrating everything into the much larger, growing Paramount+ is such a win. BET finally gets a broader audience for its shows, and hopefully, Cindy and the rest of TV Media’s leadership bring more library content back to Paramount+ rather than shelving everything. Hey, content is king, right?