Shari Redstone has gone back to the drawing board to sell a piece of struggling media giant Paramount Global.
The company reportedly entered exclusive talks to sell Black Entertainment Television network to a group of buyers headed by BET CEO Scott Mills — after calling off an auction last year that failed to generate the roughly $3 billion it was seeking for the cable channel.
Now, Mills and Manhattan-based private equity CC Capital, headed by Chinh Chu, have offered around $1.7 billion, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.
The Post has sought comment from Paramount and BET.
“CC Capital’s policy is to not comment on these types of rumors,” a spokesperson for the private equity firm told The Post on Tuesday.
This is the second time in the last year that Mills and Chu are making a run at the cable network, whose future is uncertain in the wake of the aborted merger between parent company Paramount and David Ellison’s production firm Skydance Media.
Redstone, who owns a controlling stake in Paramount through her family holding company National Amusements, killed the Skydance deal last month over what she felt was a lowball price as well as possible shareholder lawsuits.
On Monday, billionaire media mogul Barry Diller entered the Paramount saga by announcing he is exploring a bid to buy Redstone’s NAI stake, The New York Times reported.
The stunning turn of events came ahead of next week’s Sun Valley Media Conference, which attracts many media titans.
When asked whether he was looking for financial partners after Redstone turned down $2.25 billion from Skydance for NAI, Diller scoffed at the notion.
“Absurd, IAC has cash and liquidity in excess of $4 billion,” he told The Post on Tuesday.
Meantime, Paramount — whose entertainment holdings include CBS, MTV and Nickelodeon and the Hollywood studios — has once again turned its attention to selling BET.
Last December, Bloomberg reported that the investment group fronted by Mills and Chu were prepared to pay just under $2 billion for BET.
Tyler Perry, the actor and filmmaker who has invested in the BET+ streaming service, also reportedly held talks with Paramount about buying an ownership stake in the cable channel.
But he balked at Paramount’s $3 billion asking price, as The Post previously reported.
He said it was “disrespectful” for the company to demand a sales price that was “not worth anywhere near the value” that BET was worth.
Byron Allen, the former standup comedian-turned media mogul, led an investor group that offered $3.5 billion for BET and VH1.
Another potential suitor who was said to be interested in BET was Sean “Diddy” Combs, the rapper and mogul who faces a lawsuit from a woman who alleges that he sexually assaulted her at a New York City recording studio in 2003.
Paramount Global finally announced last August that it would sell a majority stake in the network.
BET was originally started by Robert and then-wife Sheila Johnson in 1980.
Robert Johnson created BET from the basement of his Washington, DC, home after securing a $500,000 loan from longtime cable executive John Malone and eventually built the brand into the leading TV network for black Americans.
Johnson expanded BET by creating smaller digital networks geared to fans of jazz, gospel and hip-hop along with being a publishing house and event production firm.
In the early 1990s, the network became the first black-controlled television company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
BET has seen a decline in subscribers and revenue over the past decade.
Subscribers fell to an estimated 66.3 million in 2022 from 89.5 million in 2014, a peak year for cable television, according to S&P Global.
S&P said the cable network’s annual profits have fallen from an estimated peak of $319 million in 2013 to $188 million in 2022.
The jewel of the BET Media Group acquisition could have been BET+, which launched in 2019. BET says the streaming service has more than 3 million subscribers.
BET beefed up its content after Johnson and his then-wife, Sheila, sold BET to Viacom in 2000 for $3 billion – which made them the nation’s first black billionaires.
He remained the CEO until 2006.
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