Paramount Global has reached a deal with the co-creators of the hit adult animated sitcom “South Park” to bring episodes of the show to its streaming platform Paramount Plus in the United States for the first time.
The deal ends a contentious back-and-forth between Paramount and show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone that saw episodes of South Park disappear from Paramount Plus in markets outside the United States for about a week.
Paramount’s cable network Comedy Central has offered South Park since the late 1990s, but the show has never appeared on a Paramount-backed streaming service in the United States. Past episodes of the show were previously licensed to Netflix, Disney-owned Hulu and, most recently, Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO Max (later Max).
The new deal will see Paramount Plus serve as the exclusive home of South Park in all markets, starting next year. The five-year deal is valued at $1.5 billion, or $300 million per year, according to two sources. Paramount Plus will offer episodes of the show one day after they air on Comedy Central in the United States, and will have the rights to current and past episodes of the show for both Paramount Plus and SkyShowtime outside the U.S.
Paramount Plus currently offered South Park specials, which the company described as “movies,” but hasn’t offered full episodes of the TV program in the United States. The specials were the focal point of a lawsuit between WBD and Paramount, with the former accusing the latter of breaching its contract to offer exclusive streaming rights to the show in the U.S.
Some older episodes of South Park were sublicensed to the free streaming platform Pluto TV, but weren’t made available on demand through that platform.
The 27th season of South Park is expected to debut on Wednesday. It was originally scheduled to start earlier this month, but the debut was delayed while Paramount worked with Parker and Stone on a new digital rights agreement.
The digital rights deal is separate from Paramount’s broadcast TV agreement, which involves new episodes of the show being developed for Comedy Central for the next two years Paramount continues to engage with Parker and Stone on a renewed TV deal that would involve the development of additional new seasons beyond 2027.
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story involved a typographical error that accidentally inflated the value of the five-year TV deal. It is $1.5 billion, not $15 billion.
