About Christopher Mccarthy
Christopher McCarthy, co-chief executive officer of Paramount Global, said on the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call that the company added 5.6 million new subscribers in the quarter, the strongest quarter in two years, and 10 million for the full year. He stated that global watch time per user improved 20% in Q4 and that churn improved by over 100 basis points year-over-year. McCarthy noted that total company adjusted operating income returned to growth, up 30% year-over-year to $3.1 billion, and that free cash flow reached $489 million, the highest in four years. He said the company is “making the successful transformation into a streaming‑first company” and expressed confidence that Paramount Plus will achieve domestic profitability in 2025.
In earlier interviews, McCarthy described the company’s strategy as focused on creating “mass commercial hits” and franchising its intellectual property to fuel Paramount Plus growth. He said the winner of the streaming wars “is not going to be the one that spends the most money but the one that makes the mass commercial hits” and that the company is “laser focused on making the big hits and turning them into franchises.” He also noted that Paramount Global was leveraging its linear television base, where “over 70% of all TV minutes are spent on linear,” to launch new series and accelerate its streaming service.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Christopher Mccarthy's recent appearances.
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Transcript (5 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
We are in the midst of the streaming wars. Paramount Plus obviously plays a huge role for you in all of this. I want to understand how you're seeing this play out, but also how you're seeing the traditional legacy piece of this play out, both in terms of legacy television and the film business. There was a lot of consternation over last week's box office with Steven Spielberg's film, and whether something like that will never be able to work in the theater anymore.
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Christopher Mccarthy0:34
Listen, thanks for having me. We're making incredible progress and we have a really unique strategy. You need to talk about our legacy business. We're leveraging that legacy business. We're still to this day over 70% of all TV minutes are spent on linear, but we're using that great base to launch new series and bring that to accelerate our streaming service, Paramount Plus, where only nine months in, we're making incredible progress. We're already the fastest growing service in streaming.
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Interviewer1:03
And when you think about your streaming service relative to what you're seeing out of NBC Universal's Peacock, for example, Netflix, Disney, how do you stack up? And by the way, what is your sense in terms of long-term how many of these services a viewer will ultimately have?
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Christopher Mccarthy1:24
Relative to what the competition is doing, we're playing a very different game. We're really taking our big massive hits that we have on linear, like Yellowstone, which we just premiered back just a few weeks ago. It's already the number one show in the US with 15 million viewers. But we're taking those big hits and we're franchising those quickly to bring them into Paramount Plus to accelerate that growth. So for us, it's a unique strategy that's about franchising our biggest IP and bringing those big fan bases in. And it's working. We feel really great about the progress we've made and the continued growth of where we're going to go. To your point around how it's all going to end, I think the winner of this war is really going to be the one with the most mass hits and the biggest set of IP. And when you stand in that space, we feel really great about what we've built and we have a lot more room to grow.
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Shepard Smith2:11
Shepard Smith here. Thanks for watching CNBC on YouTube.
