With two recent deals, Byron Allen has elevated his profile in both late-night TV and the digital media space. He’s about to take control of struggling media company BuzzFeed, and next week he is getting the the CBS time slot that is being vacated this month by “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” after the network canceled it.
Allen, a former stand-up comedian whose Allen Media Group owns 13 local TV stations, The Weather Channel and other media properties, earlier this week announced a deal to acquire a 52% controlling stake in BuzzFeed. He’s paying $20 million in cash up front, plus $100 million in a promissory note due in five years.
When the deal closes (expected by the end of this month), Allen will become BuzzFeed‘s chairman and CEO, replacing co-founder Jonah Peretti, who will become president of BuzzFeed AI. Since its IPO in 2021, BuzzFeed has languished in red ink and struggled with debt commitments. In short, it’s well past its peak viral-content era a decade ago.
How is Allen going to turn things around at BuzzFeed? “I’ve done much harder things. They don’t have problems that are that big,” he said. “The money is the easy part. The strategy is to really grow this.”
Here’s the plan, according to Allen: He’s going to bring BuzzFeed and HuffPost “to your living room” — by extending their brands into what he claims will become a “premier global free streaming service,” incorporating professionally produced content and user-generated videos.
“We can put them in the streaming business,” he said.
To do that, Allen said he’s going to leverage the Weather Channel’s Local Now streaming service, which he said provides “super-hyper-localization down to your Zip Code” to provide news, weather, sports and traffic content. Local Now ingests about 500,000 pieces of video per day. Local Now, which also provides free, ad-supported TV shows and movies, is a “best-in-class…