Viacom & Sony Take Different Paths In Reaching A Streaming Mobile Audience

It’s going down.

Viacom is reportedly doing really well on taking a bunch of their brands like Comedy Central, MTV, and others, and then making deals with mobile companies all over the world so that their apps show up for viewers to check out local and syndicated programming from some of the top brands in the world. Currently, UK, all over Latin America, and Europe, the company has been doing a stellar job in footing mobile footholds in growing-yet-established markets where mobile-first users would have access to their content from a variety of different ways including Paramount+, the company’s answer to Netflix in the Nordic regions.

This follows the media conglomerate’s recent sizable investment in ad-supported streaming on demand service Pluto TV all the while, Sony has sold it’s stake in one of the original Ad-supported online destinations Crackle to the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” brand. Sony’s library of content will still be made available on the site, but with this latest move, it begs the question as to what stays and goes on Crackle. The site has a bunch of anime and features SuperMansion which was one of the channel’s biggest intellectual properties, but there hasn’t been an announcement yet made on the future of both.

Note, it doesn’t matter if you are an ad-supported network or a subscription service, if you’re not investing in content and then the follow up marketing for said content, you could very well get lost in a very crowded field. The likes of Vice, Verizon, NBC Universal, and others have learned this the hard way. Post the Crackle deal, there’s been rumors of a Crackle Plus service launching, however, it’s only in an Alpha-build launch internally.