Tyler Perry’s 25% ownership stake in BET+ has been acquired by Paramount. BET+ is shutting down as a standalone streaming service in June. Everything on it, more than 1,000 hours of content, is moving to Paramount+.
If you are a BET+ subscriber, you will be offered a discounted Paramount+ subscription as part of the transition.
The current BET+ price is $5.99 per month with ads or $9.99 without. Paramount has not announced what the discounted rate will be.
BET+ currently has approximately 3.5 million subscribers. Paramount+ has around 80 million. The gap between those two numbers explains most of the decision.
What Is Happening And When
Starting in June 2026, BET+ will no longer exist as a separate app or service.
Its entire content library will move to a dedicated BET Hub inside Paramount+.
According to BET president Louis Carr, the content will be “clearly branded, prominently featured and easy to find” inside the hub.
The shows moving over include Tyler Perry-produced titles: Ruthless, All the Queen’s Men, and Zatima, the Sistas spinoff. Also moving is The Ms. Pat Show, Diarra From Detroit, and the rest of BET+’s original, film, and classic programming catalog.
BET’s linear cable channel, BET Studios, and BET Digital will continue operating as before.
The FAST channels built around Perry’s catalog will also remain active. What is ending is BET+ as a standalone streaming product.
What Is Perry’s Stake And What Does He Get?
Perry secured his 25% equity stake in BET+ as part of a 2019 production deal with BET Media Group.
Financial terms of the buyout were not disclosed by Paramount. His stake is estimated to have been worth tens of millions of dollars, some reports put the figure in the eight-figure range.
Importantly, Perry is not exiting BET entirely. Paramount confirmed he will “continue to be a valued and important partner through his overall programming agreement.”
That agreement, his most recent deal with BET Media Group, is valued at nine figures and runs through 2028. It covers producing new and existing series for both BET and BET+. What changes is that he was an owner of BET+. Now he is a contractor with Paramount.
As one outlet put it: there is a meaningful distinction between a creator with equity and one with a contract.
Why This Is Happening Now
This is the most direct execution so far of a strategy Paramount announced after Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount Global in August 2025. New CEO David Ellison signaled shortly after the deal closed that Paramount+, BET+, and the AVOD platform Pluto TV would all be consolidated onto a single shared technology infrastructure.
BET+ being absorbed into Paramount+ is the first major move in that consolidation.
Carr, who took over leadership of BET Networks after former CEO Scott Mills departed in December, framed the move as expansion rather than contraction.
“Beginning in June, we are expanding our reach by making Paramount+ the new home for BET+ content,” he wrote in a staff memo. “This powerful next step ensures the stories we champion, the creators we support, and the culture we represent go further than ever before.”
The comparison others in the industry are drawing is to what Paramount did with Showtime, eliminating it as a standalone app and folding its content into Paramount+.
Disney has done something similar but stopped short of full absorption: Hulu exists as a tile inside Disney+ but is also still available as a separate service. Warner Bros.
Discovery added Discovery programming to HBO Max after their 2022 merger but kept Discovery+ as a separate offering. Paramount is going further, doing a full merger rather than a tile.
Who Is Tyler Perry?
Tyler Perry was born in New Orleans on September 13, 1969. He grew up in poverty and endured a childhood marked by abuse.
He moved to Atlanta around 1990 and in 1992 staged his first play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, at a community theater, financing it with $12,000 in life savings. The play was a financial failure.
He kept going, rewriting it repeatedly over the next six years and restaging it in Atlanta at the House of Blues and then the Fox Theatre in 1998.
He built a massive following on what was known as the Chitlin’ Circuit, the urban theater circuit reaching Black audiences across the South.
Before he made a single Hollywood film, Perry had sold more than $100 million worth of tickets to his stage productions and $30 million in related merchandise.
His debut film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, came in 2005 through a deal with Lionsgate. It was a box office success.
The character he is most associated with is Madea, a no-nonsense Black grandmother, who has appeared in 14 films, the most recent being Madea’s Destination Wedding, which premiered on Netflix in July 2025.
His Madea franchise alone has grossed nearly $700 million worldwide, with each installment typically produced for under $10 million.
In 2015 he purchased the 330-acre former Fort McPherson military base in Atlanta for $30 million and spent an additional $250 million converting it into Tyler Perry Studios.
The complex features 12 soundstages, 50,000 square feet of permanent sets, including a replica of the White House, and is one of the largest production facilities in the United States.
Black Panther was the first film shot on the new stages. Netflix’s Bridgerton has filmed there. Perry has described the significance of it directly, “The Confederate Army is fighting to keep Negroes enslaved in America on this very ground. And now this very ground is owned by me.”
In 2017 he signed a landmark deal with Viacom, now Paramount Global, committing to produce 90 episodes of original scripted content annually for $150 million per year.
As part of that deal, he secured his 25% stake in BET+. His net worth is estimated at approximately $1.4 billion. He owns 100% of the content he has created.
The BET+ equity stake is now Paramount’s. Perry still has his contract, his studio, his content, and his library. He will still produce for BET and BET+, just without the ownership position he held for the last seven years.
What This Means For The Streaming Wars
BET+ at 3.5 million subscribers was never going to compete with Netflix, Max, or even Paramount+.
The economics of running a standalone niche streaming service have gotten harder every year as subscribers have become more selective about which services they pay for.
Moving BET’s content to a platform with 80 million subscribers expands the potential audience for every show on the service by roughly 23 times.
Whether that expansion translates into viewership depends on how prominently Paramount features the BET Hub and whether existing Paramount+ subscribers discover content that was previously walled off behind a separate subscription.
The Showtime comparison is instructive, that content got more exposure inside Paramount+ but the standalone Showtime brand lost visibility in the process.
BET+ is gone in June. Paramount+ is where the content lives now.
