Sony Pictures Television raised a few eyebrows earlier this month when it unveiled a trio of streaming deals for Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune right as it was in the middle of litigation with CBS over the rights to the shows.The studio struck deals with Peacock, Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ to bring the daytime shows to streaming the day after they air, starting with the 2025/26 season.Keith LeGoy, Chairman, Sony Pictures Television, said that the streaming rights are “completely separate” to its syndicated deals.“This is completely separate from those. We have a long historic thing with CBS. They are the distributor for syndicated broadcast television,” he said at a keynote at the Banff World Media Festival. “There is a pending litigation, which I really can’t talk too much about, because it’s pending litigation. The documents are out there in the public domain, if people really care to read them, but that is pursuing its course and will get resolved in due course. We feel pretty good about our arguments and that we will prevail.”The move came days after three Appeal Court judges from the Second Appellate District ruled that CBS will remain the sole distributor of the rights to these shows.LeGoy revealed that the streaming rights were not covered by any previous arrangement. He said that when it took the lead on negotiating the last syndication deal with the ABC stations, it specifically carved out the ability to do next day streaming.“Then, we told, or asked, CBS to mirror that in all of the other syndication deals that they did, so that we could do this without surprising or upsetting any of the syndication partners, who are incredibly important to us; these shows are the number one and number two shows on television in a world where people say that broadcast is [dead], these shows still get 7/8M viewers every single day. What we wanted to do with streaming was to really give ourselves the chance to find a new and different audience. We believe that the syndication audience and the streaming audience don’t cross over that much. This is going to be amplifying these shows and broadening their appeal, rather than cannibalizing any existing partnerships,” he added.Jeopardy!, which is hosted by Ken Jennings, is entering Season 42, while Wheel of Fortune, which is hosted by Ryan Seacrest and Vanna White, is entering Season 43. Both shows are produced by Sony Pictures Television with Michael Davies serving as exec producer of Jeopardy! and Bellamie Blackstone exec producing Wheel of Fortune.
© 2025 Deadline.