SkyShowtime costs £300m in year 1
October 9, 2023
Sky and Paramount Pictures spent nearly £300 million (€347m) setting up their streaming service for Europe last year. The joint venture of Comcast’s Sky and Paramount launched in September 2022, aims to sign millions of non-English-speaking customers across the continent to watch TV series.
Accounts for the UK business, available in 20 markets, shows its cost €323 million in its first 13 months of operation, to December 2022. Most of the company’s costs were for content from Sky and Paramount. The business generated revenues of €133 million, and its losses amounted to €190 million. The company said its performance was “in line with expectations” and added that it was “widely expected for a new streaming business to be loss making in the first years of its operations”, reported The Sunday Times.
SkyShowtime, which first launched in the Nordics in September 2022 and rolled out to other countries over the following six months, includes a mixture of Hollywood-made and local programming. Its English-original content comes from Comcast-owned brands such as Universal Pictures and Sky Studios, and from Paramount’s group, which includes Nickelodeon.