‘SpongeBob’ In, Showtime Still Out, and Other New Details on the CBS All Access Refresh Coming in Early 2021

Late last week, CBS All Access surprise-dropped more than 3,500 TV episodes into the service from the Viacom side of the December 2019 Viacom-CBS merger. The new titles — including RuPaul’s Drag Race, Chappelle’s Show, The Legend of Korra, and 21 seasons of The Challenge — represent roughly one-third of the new additions to the service for its relaunch in early 2021.

In his most detailed interview to date about the relaunch of CBS All Access and just ahead of the company quarterly earnings report on Thursday, ViacomCBS chief digital officer Marc Debevoise tells Decider:

• ViacomCBS will likely divide the current app that is used for both CBS All Access and cable-authenticated viewing of CBS shows into separate apps.
• Showtime, BET+ and Noggin will continue as separate services and will not be available as add-ons to the relaunched service, though a discount for subscribing to both CBS All Access and Showtime will likely continue.
• The relaunched service will likely have BET-branded originals that are not available on the BET cable channel or the BET+ streamer.
• Nickelodeon will get a significant bump of additional children’s content with the relaunch.
• ViacomCBS is “not asking distribution partners to change their business plans” and expects to continue to be available after the relaunch on all the platforms where it is currently available, including Roku and Amazon Fire TV.
• Episodes of CBS shows will continue to be available the next day on the relaunched service, but episodes from shows on BET, Comedy Central, MTV and other ViacomCBS cable networks will not become available on the streamer until a year or more after those seasons end.
• The company has not yet decided whether to end the Comedy Central Now, MTV Hits and Nick Hits channels on Apple TV and Amazon Channels that are now effectively part of CBS All Access.

That’s in addition to the announcement late last week that Kamp Koral, a SpongeBob SquarePants spinoff series, will premiere in early 2021 on the relaunched streamer rather than on the Nickelodeon cable channel as originally planned.

DECIDER: I’m glad to see Viacom and CBS’s combined catalogs finally start to come together. This is something I’ve been hoping CBS All Access would do since the merger.

MARC DEBEVOISE: We heard you. [Laughs.]

Is the idea of adding catalog titles to CBS All Access that subscribers will spend more time on the service?

I certainly hope that adding more content will add more engagement for current subscribers, and it adds more value to the subscription over all. Keeping the price the same gives our service a leg to go after subscribers that have churned out and new subscribers, and it gives us tools to engage different audiences.

We now have a significant amount of content for kids with Nickelodeon, and that will expand more over time. We have Comedy Central, which is a much younger-male focus than the comedy we had on the service. Same thing with MTV and BET, which have a younger, reality-driven focus.

CBS All Access will relaunch in early 2021. What does that actually mean?

The service today is effectively an upgrade of the CBS app, and we really want to have it stand on its own. We’re going to rebrand the service, add 10,000 episodes and movies to it, and develop a slate of exclusive original content from the brands within the service. That’s going to take some time to build those originals, get the catalog content together, and redo the interface.

CBS will have an app that you can upgrade to this service, but we want to have it somewhat separated. We knew after we decided on that strategy that it would take us nine months or so to do it, and we realized three months later — which is now — that we could launch the brands, change the interface a bit, and go ahead and launch one-third of the content now and evolve the service over the next six months.

Will the new service sit in the existing CBS All Access app the way HBO Max took over the HBO Max app on most platforms?

We’re still working through the details of that. What we want is that if you’re a subscriber, the app will turn into the new app. If you use just the CBS app authenticated with a cable operator, then we’ll make that available on a dedicated CBS app and experience.

I’m sure you’re watching the carriage disputes now that are keeping HBO Max and Peacock off of Roku and Amazon Fire TV. How are you thinking about that with your relaunch coming in early 2021?

We’ve been in the market for five years with a phenomenal service and great relationships with those players, and we expect those partnerships to continue. We’re providing an improved service, and we’re not asking distribution partners to change their business plans or change things in some crazy way. We’re in a great position to maintain our distribution status on every major platform.

Has watching HBO Max and Peacock navigate their launches factored into your plans?

I wouldn’t comment on what those services have done, but we have the history and the strong relationships. We’re not owned by a distributor or attached to a distributor, so we have a very diversified subscriber base across all of the major distributors.

CBS will have the Super Bowl in February 2021. Are you hoping to relaunch around that?

We don’t have a specific date yet for the relaunch and rebrand, but the first quarter of 2021 has a lot of opportunities between, hopefully, the NFL playoffs, the Super Bowl, the Grammy Awards and March Madness.

The new service will be the same thing as CBS All Access insofar as it will have the same price and same content catalog as CBS All Access?

That’s correct. We’ll have the live feed of CBS, we’ll have the current seasons and catalog seasons of CBS shows that we have now, and we’ll have episodes and movies from the other ViacomCBS brands, including hundreds of titles from Paramount Pictures.

Is the idea of changing the name of the service that you want something that connotes a broader range of content than “CBS”?

We want a name that can sit over those brands and aggregate those brands for users. We’re working on that now and will have more to say on that in the not-too-distant future.

The new interface that you just launched is organized around six nameplates — CBS, BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and Smithsonian Channel. Will a new Comedy Central or MTV series on the service be marketed as a Comedy Central or MTV series?

The best example I can give you is Kamp Koral that we just announced, which is a spinoff of SpongeBob that will be exclusive to the new service. In the Nickelodeon section on CBS All Access, we now have 11 seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants. New seasons will still go on the Nickelodeon television network, and we’ll get them a year-plus later when the come into past-season status. We’ll have The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run around the launch of the new service. And we’ll have Kamp Koral there in that Nickelodeon section.

How will Sponge on the Run work? Will it be be an original that will stay on the service forever?

It will be an original following a paid VOD launch. Like Trolls World Tour and Scoob did. We’ll do that on PVOD for a short window, and then it will be on the service longterm.

Are there other upcoming film titles that will work the same way?

We don’t have others to announce, but we could certainly do more of those going forward. We believe in the theatrical business longterm, and we also sell movies to other outlets.

Do you have licensing or carriage obstacles to bringing something like The Daily Show with Trevor Noah to the service with same-day or next-day episodes, or are you making an affirmative decision not to carry it?

We’ve decided that our windowing for cable will be for past-season content.

So when the next season of Siesta Key is on MTV, you won’t have next-day episodes on the service?

Right, we would have that later on.

You have Star Trek: Lower Decks starting soon and Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 in October. How far off are you from having Star Trek as a churn-proof, year-round franchise?

We will have 23 straight weeks of original episodes starting Thursday with Star Trek: Lower Decks, which is an animated comedy from one of the writers on Rick and Morty. There’s huge interest in the show. It’s the most trailer views we’ve ever gotten for an original series. That runs for 10 weeks, and then Discovery will start the week after and run for 13 weeks. Star Trek: Picard Season 2 will be ready sometime in 2021.

I’ve been rewatching the first seasons of Reno 911! and Kroll Show on the Comedy Central Now channel that’s $4 a month on Apple TV and Amazon Channels. Will channels like that, MTV Hits and Nick Hits go away now that the catalogs are on CBS All Access?

We’ll have an overlap between those channels and CBS All Access for the moment. What we do with those channels in the long run is TBD.

What about BET+?

BET+ will continue for sure; that’s a joint venture with Tyler Perry and has a unique set of content that’s not going to be on BET or on CBS All Access. We’ll have BET representation on All Access and are looking to build originals for that, but it will be separate from BET+.

What about Noggin?

Noggin is a unique service we run that has content for preschoolers with games and educational content, and it also has preschool video content from Nick and Nick Jr. We will have the video content in All Access but not the game content, which will continue to be a standalone service.

We did not launch the preschool content in this round for All Access, but we’ll launch it later. We have parental controls built into the service, but we’re building out some specialized features for that age group.

Showtime is available to add to services like Hulu and AT&T. When will you be able to add it to CBS All Access?

You can already do it when you sign up for CBS All Access, and you can add CBS All Access when you sign up for Showtime.

Showtime is not integrated into CBS All Access, though, the way it is with Hulu. Do you want to integrate Showtime and CBS All Access together?

That’s not something we’re contemplating at the moment. We want to work to grow the services together and we’re thinking about how to bundle them.

You don’t want Showtime and CBS All Access users to eventually have an integrated experience?

Well, that’s a pointed question. [Laughs.] We have Showtime as an add-on service to CBS All Access and vice versa, but we have not built them as channels of each other.

That will not be a part of the relaunch in early 2021.

That’s not on the current roadmap.

So the relaunched app will have originals in these Viacom nameplates and more children’s content. Are those the two big things that will be different after the relaunch?

We’re working on features and functionality. We’ve got exclusive sports. The National Women’s Soccer League just finished up a tournament on the service. The UEFA Champions League and Europa League are about to start. New functionality coming to the service in the fall will show you how to toggle from game to game when there’s as many as six games going on at one time.

We made some big personalization changes in this round of updates to the service. The new home page is now much more machine-learning driven, so the things you see will start to filter by your behavior in the carousels and rows that you see. We’ve added more genres. We have Trending to bring more popular content to the front. More of that is coming.

How will that look? If I watch a lot of UEFA soccer, I’ll see it higher up in the user interface?

The service will use what you watch, what other people watch, and what’s new, and it layers those things together. You’ll see Trending, Recommended for You, and Keep Watching, and you’re viewing will drive what carousels you’ll see next — comedies or dramas or kids shows. Those will begin to sort more algorithmically than by our choices. We’ll also start to highlight things that are on now like news and sports.

Are you planning to add more top-level brands besides the six that you’re showing right now?

Never say never, but we don’t have immediate plans to add to those main brands.

Will the August 20 MTV Video Music Awards be on CBS All Access either live or at some point on demand?

It will not be live on CBS All Access. That will be available only on the cable networks and on the authenticated app. If we get the on-demand rights, it would be much later. We will run a lot of connect from the key brands a year-plus later, but the only broadcast or cable network running live on the service is CBS.

CBS All Access has made live viewing a priority with live CBS, live news, and live sports. How are you thinking about election coverage and other live programming going forward?

We’ll have full and robust CBS News election coverage on the service. We’ll have live, local news and live, 24-hour coverage on our CBSN news channel. We’ve seen huge, huge growth of CBSN viewing over the last few quarters given all the national news.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider. He is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast and a podcast producer for Starburns Audio. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.