CBS All-Access and Showtime’s over-the-top subscription service are on track to hit eight million subscribers a year ahead of schedule, the company said on Thursday.
“Our direct-to-consumer platforms, CBS All Access and Showtime OTT, are greatly exceeding our expectations,” CBS chief Les Moonves said in a statement accompanying the company’s second quarter earnings report on Thursday.
“Our goal was to have eight million subscribers combined by 2020, and we are now on track to hit that number in 2019. For that reason, and based on our trajectory of growth in these services, we now predict that CBS All Access and Showtime OTT will have 16 million domestic subscribers by 2022.”
The company will have doubled its subscriber goal in just two years, Moonves said, if it hits the new mark.
In the company’s second quarter earnings results CBS reported that revenue from digital initiatives increased 70 percent in the quarter year-over-year. The company’s CBS All Access streaming platform has already seen success with original shows, such as “The Good Fight” and “Star Trek: Discovery.”
And during the company’s quarterly conference call with analysts and investors, Moonves said that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime series “Who Is America,” led to the highest number of OTT subscriber sign up in a single day.
“We produce more than 13 hours of original content a day. This allows us to continue to feed our streaming platform,” chief operations officer Joe Ianniello said during the conference call. “[We’re] going to see a ramp up with more original content driving growth in 2019 and 2020.”
Moonves noted that CBS is now producing 70 series across 10 different streaming platforms, including Netflix and Apple.
CBS on Thursday reported financial results that edged Wall Street expectations, reporting earnings of $1.12 per share, up from a year ago and just above analysts expectations of $1.11 per share, according to estimates gathered by Yahoo Finance.
Revenue for the quarter was $3.47 billion for the quarter, compared with the company’s $3.26 billion in revenue the company reported last year, and just above analysts’ $3.46 billion expectations.
“At a time when many companies are losing subscribers or cutting rates to maintain them, we are growing and as we do, our average subscriber rate is increasing at an even faster pace and the driving force behind this growth comes down to one thing, our premium content,” Moonves said.