Paramount Earnings: Star Trek And Sheridan Drive 11.7% Of Paramount+ Revenue

Thursday, 27 February 2025, 8:23 am
Press Release: Parrot Analytics

Paramount Global's Wednesday earnings call marks a pivotal moment. With the Skydance merger on the horizon, investors are hoping the combined entity can reverse a staggering five-year streak of double-digit share price declines.

All legacy media firms have struggled to compete with Netflix in the 2020s. However, Paramount Global has been particularly challenged by its over-reliance on pay TV and its inability to establish a top-tier global streaming service.

That said, Paramount’s pivot to streaming has seen some progress, with Paramount+ largely trending in the right direction in terms of subscriber and revenue growth. This is a testament to the success of Paramount+ originals from the Star Trek and Taylor Sheridan universes.

These series combined accounted for just 2.3% of Paramount+’s supply, but 11.7% of Paramount+’s UCAN subscriber revenue in Q3 2024, proving to be a strong content investment. However, the platform's reliance on bundled subscriptions with linear providers limits its revenue upside and raises questions about long-term subscriber stickiness.

While Skydance brings substantial financial backing, the degree to which its principals are willing to invest in a truly competitive streaming offering remains a key question. The arrival of new management doesn't automatically solve the fundamental challenges facing Paramount's declining linear assets.

The Ellison team must consider all available options, including:

Asset restructuring: Spinoffs or reorganizations of cable networks, similar to what industry rivals Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery have done recently.
Content consolidation strategy: Focusing resources on the company's most valuable IP franchises (Star Trek, the Taylor Sheridan universe, Mission: Impossible) while reducing investment in underperforming content categories to maximize ROI on content spend.
M&A activity: While a long shot, a strategic partnership or even a merger with a larger streaming player — especially Netflix — could offer a path to long-term survival. This could potentially leverage shared infrastructure, create content synergies, and reduce competitive pressures.

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With the incoming Skydance leadership, Paramount Global has enough financial runway to keep fighting in the streaming wars on its own for several years. Though the company boasts some key revenue generating assets, change and innovation is inevitably needed. What form that takes under new leadership is one of the most significant questions facing the industry in 2025.

Star Trek and Taylor Sheridan Revenue Contributions

Since Mayor of Kingstown premiered at the end of 2021 and kicked off the rapid expansion of the Taylor Sheridan universe on Paramount+, Parrot Analytics’ Streaming Economics model calculates that the Sheridan-verse has delivered over a quarter billion dollars in subscriber revenue for Paramount+ in the UCAN region alone ($263M).
To better contextualize the aggregate financial impact of the Sheridan-verse for Paramount+, we compared the amount of subscriber revenue it has generated for the platform to the Star Trek franchise. In Q3 2024, we calculate that the entire Star Trek franchise (shows and movies) was responsible for 7.7% of the subscriber revenue of Paramount+ in UCAN. Over the same time, the Sheridan-verse delivered 4.0% of the platform’s subscriber revenue.
Both franchises over-perform the share of catalog they account for on Paramount+. Star Trek has a significantly longer history with more titles spanning TV and film, accounting for 1.7% of the Paramount+ catalog in Q3 2024. Sheridan-verse shows meanwhile accounted for a mere 0.6% of titles available on the platform in Q3 2024.

M&A Match Up: Netflix & Paramount Global

The likelihood of this activity seems low at the moment, but if the Streaming Era has taught us anything, it’s that all options are always on the table. The logistics of how this hypothetical partnership would work remain unknown, but a combination of these companies would lead the industry in several key categories, using full year 2024 data:
US corporate demand share (20.7%), which accounts for all original TV content produced under each company’s umbrella. This can help effectively value a conglomerate’s legacy and library content in aggregate.
US total catalog share (27.1%), which measures a streamer’s entire library including both original and licensed movies and TV series.
Global streaming original share (37.8%), which accounts for all of the original programming produced by each streaming service.
This combination would provide the younger and female-skewing US library for Netflix with older-male skewing content through Star Trek and Taylor Sheridan shows, plus major sports rights that Netflix has been reluctant to pony up for given the cost.
Paramount's Nickelodeon would strengthen Netflix's animation offerings, which have proven to be effective global demand generators on the TV side. On the film side, however, the streamer still struggles to match its theatrical rivals in family friendly original animated movies. Access to Paw Patrol and upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender movies would help.

Star Trek Revenue Per Platform

Netflix was the biggest beneficiary of Star Trek content early on, able to best monetize global demand for this beloved franchise with the international rights to new series like Star Trek: Discovery and legacy titles in the franchise like Star Trek: The Original Series.
However, the growth of Paramount+ enabled the streamer to better monetize its own franchise. Q2 2022 marked the first quarter where the Star Trek franchise was generating more subscriber revenue for Paramount+ globally than for Netflix.
From Q1 2020-Q3 2024, Netflix earned just over $1B in global revenue from the Star Trek franchise. Over the same time, Paramount+ has raked in roughly $940M, while Amazon Prime Video — which has global rights to Star Trek: Picard, among others — has generated $466M. All other streaming services accounted for the remaining $225M.

Parrot Analytics

Global television demand measurement

Parrot Analytics is the leading global content demand analytics company for the multi-platform TV business. With the world's largest TV audience demand datasets, the company currently tracks more than 1.5B daily expressions of demand in over 100 languages from 200+ countries to reveal the content consumers engage with and watch the most across platforms.

As a trusted partner to some of the biggest media companies and content creators in the world, Parrot Analytics optimises content workflows in real time. The company's TV analytics products result in better production, distribution, acquisition and marketing decisions, as well as accelerated SVOD platform success.

Contact Parrot Analytics

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