ViacomCBS Inc.

ViacomCBS Inc. — now Paramount Global, and since August 2025 part of Paramount Skydance Corporation — was an American mass media and entertainment conglomerate. Formed on December 4, 2019, by the merger of CBS Corporation and Viacom, it was headquartered at One Astor Plaza (1515 Broadway), New York City, and was controlled by National Amusements (Shari Redstone), which held roughly 9.7% equity and about 79.9% voting power. It was publicly traded on Nasdaq (VIAC/VIACA; later PARA/PARAA) until the Skydance merger closed on August 7, 2025. Reported size: roughly 18,600–24,500 employees and about $29.2 billion in 2024 revenue, per Wikipedia and finance data aggregators.

Operations. ViacomCBS was an operating media company, not an NPE. Its divisions included Paramount Pictures (film/TV production), CBS Entertainment (the CBS network and owned stations, plus a stake in The CW), Paramount Media Networks (MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, CMT, Paramount Network), Paramount Streaming (Paramount+, Pluto TV), Paramount International Networks (Telefe, Chilevisión, Channel 5, Network 10), Paramount Consumer Products, and Global Content Distribution. Earlier in its ViacomCBS period it also owned Simon & Schuster (sold 2020) and the CNET Media Group (sold 2020).

Litigation posture. The tracked data shows a single appearance, as a defendant, in N.D. Ill. (2020‑10‑09): Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. ViacomCBS Inc. This is the classic operating-company-defending pattern — one defendant-side case, zero plaintiff-side cases — and the plaintiff is a well-documented patent assertion entity. Cedar Lane (Canada, incorporated 2019) has filed hundreds of infringement suits asserting acquired patents, many originating from Intellectual Ventures entities, and is characterized as an NPE by Unified Patents, Stanford's NPE database, and industry trackers. Its campaigns cluster in W.D. Tex. and D. Del., with most cases ending in settlement.

Context. The single tracked suit predates the February 2022 rebrand to Paramount Global. No litigation-funding or portfolio details specific to this one case are asserted here; the case's technology focus (Cedar Lane asserts image-processing, remote-control, and compression patents) reflects the broad, low-specificity claim sets typical of that plaintiff.