Viacom news stories on Newser

SpongeBob Ratings Sinking Fast

Matt Cantor — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:35:05 CDT

SpongeBob Squarepants is 13 years old—and it may finally have dried out. The show's ratings plummeted 29% in the first quarter among kids ages 2 to 11, compared to the year before. That's bad news for Nickelodeon as a whole: The show made up 31% of Nick's schedule last...

YouTube to Rent Paramount Movies

Dustin Lushing — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:36:20 CDT

In a new deal, YouTube will be renting flicks produced by Paramount Pictures. Paramount will make available 500 movies, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off , Transformers , and The Godfather trilogy, reports Bloomberg Business Week . The titles will be online in a few weeks and cost $2.99 to $3.99 for...

CEO Salaries Climb Above Pre-Recession Levels

Kevin Spak — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:27:05 CDT

Did you know there was some kind of recession recently? You wouldn't, if you looked at CEO paychecks. CEOs were paid more last year than they were in 2007, when unemployment was at half what it is now and the stock market was at record highs, the AP reports. S&P...

Media Moguls: Obama's Scaring Big Business

Kevin Spak — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:02:00 CDT

The Sun Valley summit of media titans last week was a dour affair, with the CEOs lamenting the poor state of the economy—and how little faith they have in the Obama administration to fix it. In on- and off-the-record conversations with the moguls, Peter Lauria of the Daily Beast...

South Park Bully Group Denies Link to NYC Bomb

Mary Papenfuss — Mon, 03 May 2010 05:12:00 CDT

An Islamist group that threatened South Park creators with harm for making light of the Prophet Mohammed has denied any involvement in the Times Square car bomb. The man who runs the Web site for the Revolution Muslim group in Queens acknowledged he was at Times Square when the propane...

Comedy Central Picks Up Onion Sports Network

John Johnson — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:46:17 CDT

The Onion will soon be making fun of the world of sports on cable TV. Comedy Central will run a 10-episode batch of shows beginning early next year from the Onion Sports Network, reports Mashable . Athletes, nutso fans, and sportscasters are sure to be fair game. "If I were ESPN,...

Google: Viacom Uploaded Own Clips to YouTube, Then Sued

Rob Quinn — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:29:00 CDT

Viacom secretly uploaded video clips of its shows to YouTube and then launched a $1 billion copyright-infringement suit over those same clips, according to Google's lawyers. Google claims the company, seeking to promote shows like South Park , hired over a dozen marketing agencies to upload the clips, making sure they...

Hulu Losing Daily Show, Colbert Report

Rob Quinn — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:07:00 CST

Viacom has dealt Hulu what may be its biggest programming setback yet by yanking the Daily Show , the Colbert Report , and several other Comedy Central shows from its service. Hulu announced that it would be losing the shows as of March 9 in a blog posting in which it wished...

Hollywood Reeling From DVD Slump

Peter Fearon — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:40:50 CST

Hollywood studios are faced with huge losses because of a 21% slump in DVD sales and the fallout from the crisis on Wall Street, reports the Financial Times . Studio heads have been forced to cut back on the number of new movies in production and are preparing to trim the...