CBS News 48 Hours Free streaming channel launched

There are only 24 hours in a day, but CBS News wants to fill that time 48 hours.

The true-crime news magazine will get its own free streaming channel, launching today, in an expansion of the news magazine’s existing operations.

The free, ad-supported streaming network will be called “48 Hours” and will feature more than 500 episodes of the news magazine series that have been produced to date, with new episodes airing as they air on CBS.

48 Hours will initially be available on CBS News, Paramount+ and Pluto digital platforms, with additional platforms to follow in the future.

“48 hours is probably the pinnacle of brands in terms of work across all media and platforms: we have 48 hours “It’s doing exceptionally well on Paramount+, it’s doing exceptionally well on Pluto, it’s doing exceptionally well on digital, it’s doing exceptionally well on YouTube,” says Sahand Sepehrnia, executive vice president of digital content strategy and business for CBS News and Broadcasting, Entertainment and Sports. “It’s also a show that’s doing incredibly well on FAST, right? You can watch every episode and no matter when you start it or when you finish it, every episode is self-contained, and that becomes very difficult in the entertainment world.”

The expansion of the FAST channel is also a strategic move by CBS News and its president, Wendy McMahon, to grow its audience by leveraging digital reach while maintaining its core broadcast function.

“I think the situation has been like this for many, many years, 48 hours was kind of overshadowed by where and how you could watch us,” says Judy Tygard, the show’s executive producer. “You know, we were on Saturday night for many years. Our team always jokes that it’s the loneliest night of the week, right? It has the fewest eyeballs available, and we’ve always been kind of overlooked in the true crime space because of where and how you could watch us. That expansion was like oxygen for our team to know that we were producing these high-quality episodes, and now every platform we hit just spreads like wildfire.”

In the case of the FAST channel, the plan is to create a channel with a specific theme (e.g. “Love Gone Wrong” or “Unsolved Documentaries”), with the most interesting episodes being broadcast in the evenings.

“We know our biggest audience is at night, so we program our best content at night,” Sepehrnia says. “We look at the data, we look at the audience flow, so the way we program FAST is a little bit like linear, where we look at lead out and lead in, we look at the audience flow and the changes in the audience flow.”

48 hours joins CBS News 24/7, CBS Sports HQ and local CBS stations in the streaming segment, though it is the first streaming network in the company’s portfolio dedicated to a single program.