# Viacom **Viacom** is the name that has been attached, across four corporate lives, to the cable-and-entertainment assets — MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central, [[Paramount Pictures]] — that [[Sumner Redstone]] assembled and his daughter [[Shari Redstone]] sold. The FCC's syndication rules forced CBS to spin off its program-distribution arm in 1971; Redstone's [[National Amusements]] took it over in a 1987 hostile fight; it bought Paramount and Blockbuster in 1994 and merged with CBS in 2000; Redstone split the two in January 2006, recombined them as ViacomCBS in December 2019, renamed the result [[Paramount Global]] in 2022, and it was that company that [[Skydance Media]] acquired in August 2025 — the deal that required Trump's FCC, that was preceded by the $16 million settlement of his *60 Minutes* suit, and that put [[CBS News]] under [[Bari Weiss]]. See [[Skydance-Paramount]]. ## Why it matters here Viacom is the corporate spine of the [[Paramount Timeline]] and [[CBS Timeline]]: the pattern in which a family holding company (National Amusements, with about 77% of the voting stock and 10% of the equity) controlled a public media conglomerate for four decades and then sold control to a buyer who needed a regulator's permission. Every step in the [[Media Capture]] story of 2025–26 — the settlement, the ombudsman, the news division's editor-in-chief — runs through the structure this page describes. Compare [[News Corporation]] for the Murdoch version of the same dual-class control. ## See Also - [[Sumner Redstone]] · [[Shari Redstone]] · [[National Amusements]] · [[Paramount Global]] · [[Paramount Pictures]] - [[Skydance Media]] · [[Skydance-Paramount]] · [[CBS News]] · [[Paramount Timeline]] · [[CBS Timeline]] · [[Media Capture]] · [[News Corporation]]