According to The Hollywood Reporter, CBS News’ 48 Hours is expanding with its very own free, ad-supported streaming channel. Starting today, viewers can stream the true crime program on demand on CBS News digital platforms, Paramount+ and Pluto TV, with additional platforms to follow in the coming weeks.
The service will also be called “48 Hours” and will cycle through over 500 episodes from the series’ 36 seasons so far. Episodes will be aired in a linear format 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Newscast Studio reports that the channel will also feature blocks of episodes with similar themes, including but not limited to “Crimes of Passion,” “Love Gone Wrong,” “Cold Cases,” “Hollywood Mysteries” and “Missing People.” New episodes from the newsmagazine will be added to the channel after they air on CBS, and the show’s best episodes will be scheduled to air in the evenings like they already do on the main station.
“We know that our peak audience is actually at night, and so we program our best content at night,” Sahand Sepehrnia, executive VP of digital content strategy and business for CBS News, said via The Hollywood Reporter. “We look at the data, we look at the audience flow, and so the way we program FAST is a little bit similar to linear, where we’re looking at the lead outs and the lead ins and looking at the audience flow and the changes in audience flow.”
48 Hours is not the first CBS News program to move to the streaming space, as CBS News 24/7, CBS Sports HQ and CBS local stations have already gotten their own FAST channels. However, the newest network is the first to be dedicated to a single show.
Explaining the move to FAST channels, 48 Hours executive producer Judy Tygard (Dateline, Man on the Moon) said to The Hollywood Reporter, “I think the thing is for many, many years, 48 Hours was kind of overshadowed because of where and how you could view us. You know, we’ve been on Saturday night for a lot of years. Our team always jokes, that’s the loneliest night of the week, right? Has the fewest available eyeballs, and we were always kind of overlooked in the true crime space because of where and how you could watch us. This expansion has been like oxygen to our team, that has known that we’re producing these quality episodes, and now every platform we hit, it just catches like wildfire.”
While 48 Hours is now available to watch anytime on its new FAST channel, it isn’t going anywhere on CBS. It will continue to air every week in its regular Saturday night time slot, where it’s remained a top-rated non-sports primetime offering for 18 consecutive seasons.