Author: Edmund Lee / Source: New York Times
Jan Thijs/Amazon
Viacom, the once mighty cable giant behind pop culture confections like “Jersey Shore” and children’s fare like “Dora the Explorer,” is acquiring the streaming service PlutoTV for $340 million, the companies said in an announcement on Tuesday.
This is Viacom’s most significant move into streaming, now the go-to strategy for media companies as more and more viewers forgo traditional cable subscriptions. The emergence of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu has hastened the decline of the pay TV business and has upended the media universe.
Time Warner, once the largest media business in the country, sold itself to AT&T in an $85.4 billion deal last year, and Rupert Murdoch, who had built a giant entertainment conglomerate over decades, is selling the bulk of his empire to the Walt Disney Company for $71.3 billion after a bitter bidding war against Comcast. The impetus for both deals was to create entities capable of taking on Netflix and other tech companies by offering their own streaming plans. AT&T and Disney will unveil their services by the end of the year.
Viacom’s…
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