Paramount Would Have to Sell BET Only If It Breaks Its Settlement

The antitrust deal with 12 state attorneys general also lists VH1 and protects Pluto TV as a free service for five years.

BET, VH1 and Comedy Central sit on a list of channels Paramount has to sell — but only if it gets caught. The trigger is a finding that the company didn't keep basic cable carriage talks at arm's length from Warner Bros. Discovery, and even then it gets a six-month cure period before anything changes hands. Those terms come from the settlement 12 state attorneys general reached over the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, as Deadline reported on September 21, 2026.

For the people who work in this business in Los Angeles, the binding part is thin. Nothing in the agreement stops Paramount from folding Warner Bros. Television, Paramount TV Studios and CBS Studios into a single operation, the outlet reported, and there's no cap on the positions cut when Paramount+ and HBO Max are combined. The attorneys general built their case around jobs; the television and film studios were left out of the document entirely.

What did make it in is a five-year commitment to keep Pluto TV, or another free, ad-supported streaming service, running.

That's the odd one. Pluto TV, the free streamer Paramount bought into after its 2014 founding, wasn't considered to be in danger, and Warner Bros. Discovery has no equivalent service to pair it against. Paramount Chairman and CEO David Ellison has talked up the free ad-supported space on earnings calls, and the company told investors in its second-quarter 2026 letter that Pluto and Paramount+ are central to how viewers find its shows.

Television barely registered at California Attorney General Rob Bonta's Monday press conference, per Deadline: more than six minutes on film production terms, two lines on TV. One line covered an editorial independence board for CBS News and CNN. The other covered the carriage condition. “It will mimic them being separate companies, even post-merger,” Bonta said.

If a monitor finds a material violation and Paramount doesn't come into compliance, the channels it would have to sell are BET and its sub-channels — BET Gospel, BET Her, BET Hip-Hop, BET Jams and BET Soul — plus VH1, Comedy Central, Smithsonian, Destination America and Science. MTV and Nickelodeon aren't on it. Neither is much leverage: Comedy Central's biggest asset, South Park, is tied up in a Paramount+ deal, and BET+ has already been folded into Paramount+.

Showtime isn't on the list either, and the carve-out is written into the text. The separate-negotiation clause carries a line saying it “does not apply to other Combined Entity offerings (e.g., premium cable channels, streaming services, or broadcast).” That leaves Paramount free to sell Showtime alongside HBO to distributors.

Enforcement runs through a monitor and a state committee that would field complaints, though Deadline described the mechanics as vague. Separately, Paramount said it's keeping its headquarters in Los Angeles after the merger closes.

Until a monitor finds a violation, nothing on the sell list moves. Then the clock is six months.

Source: deadline.com, retrieved September 22, 2026.