ViacomCBS quietly launched a new streaming TV channel last month on its owned-and-operated CBS stations across the country.
Little is known about Fave TV, the new digital-only broadcast channel — as of Wednesday, it has no website, no social media profile, no Wikipedia page, almost as if it doesn’t truly exist — yet it’s now available to tens of millions of homes across the United States.
A source who spoke with The Desk on background said Fave TV appears to contain a large amount of older programming from ViacomCBS’ film and television libraries. Exact programming is hard to pin down — the channel is so new that ViacomCBS has yet to provide program listings to GraceNote, a company that populates electronic program guides on cable and satellite set-top boxes and over-the-air DVRs — but The Desk spotted older episodes of “The Wayans Bros.,” Spike TV’s reality show “Auction Hunters,” MTV’s “Run’s House” and the Paramount Pictures film “Clueless.”
Commercials on Fave TV include a heavy rotation of promotional spots for ViacomCBS’ cable networks, including Comedy Central, VH1 and the Smithsonian Channel, suggesting the network acts as a pseudo-window shop channel for the company’s cable programming.
A spokesperson for ViacomCBS has not yet returned an email from The Desk seeking additional information about the channel.
