The comedian, host, and media mogul went from being the youngest comedian to perform for Carson to placing bids on Paramount and taking on YouTube. When did this all happen?
If you haven’t been paying attention, it may be wild to see Byron Allen, the comedian-turned-mogul, say things like, “When I decide to buy the whole company — I will buy the whole company — I do plan on controlling Starz” in interviews. You may have recently seen his name pop up as the guy whose show is replacing CBS‘s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which ended its 11-season tenure on the network this past May. Instead of hiring another host to steer the famous late night franchise, CBS offered up the time slot. Allen snatched it up in the form of a $15 million “time buy” that allows Comics Unleashed (which debuted in 2006) to run an hour earlier. The move resulted in an immediate 85% decline in viewership the day after Colbert’s final broadcast.
That’s no bother to Allen, truthfully. If you’re just now privy to the man who recently bought BuzzFeed, airs a late-night comedy show in Colbert’s old timeslot, owns an ever-growing network of media businesses, and has plans to purchase Starz in an effort to take on YouTube, just know that this plan Allen is enacting has been years in the making. I joke that one day we may wake up and Byron Allen will own half of Hollywood, but that’s because these bigger moves he’s been making in 2026 have been the direct result of strategic acquisitions and partnerships he’s been making since the early ’90s.
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For Allen, TV has always been part of his plan. He started out as a comedian, landing a slot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson at the age of 18 (the youngest ever to do so); Allen often speaks fondly of this moment and of Carson’s impact on him. Part of the reason Allen chose the date for premiering Comics Unleashed in Colbert’s old slot was Carson, whose final broadcast aired on May 22, 1992. “What people don’t realize is that was my hero Johnny Carson’s last night,” Allen told The Wrap. “Normally, you would premiere in September, but I said ‘No, no, no, no. That’s when Johnny stepped down. That’s when I’m stepping up.'” Following that first Carson appearance, Allen got right to work. He was offered a co-host position for the primetime series Real People, which led to The Byron Allen Show, a late-night talk show that ran from 1989 to 1992. It was more of a Carson vibe than what Comics Unleashed is today, which is more of Allen setting up a panel of comedians with questions for them to riff on. The Byron Allen Show was Great Value Carson.
In 1993, Allen founded CF Entertainment, which produced Entertainers with Byron Allen, a low-budget series in which Allen interviewed celebrities, most often during press junkets (which helped save on production costs). The series would be bartered to stations, with a split on whatever was made from advertising. For roughly a decade, CF Entertainment focused on the series and eventually created syndicated programming, such as various small-claims court shows (including those hosted by Cristina Pérez and Joe Mathis) and game shows like Who Wants to Date a Comedian?. The company changed its name to Entertainment Studios in 2003 — a subsidiary of the Allen Media Group — with plans to make films, which included optioning the rights to Sammy Davis Jr.’s story. Hollywood was a big part of Allen’s plan; in 2015, Entertainment Studios acquired Freestyle Releasing to bolster its Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures division, whose first release was 47 Meters Down in 2017.
At this point, Allen’s conglomerate was establishing its own television channels and creating its own content; with its new forays into the film industry now underway, Allen began adding more companies to his portfolio. The Allen Media Group purchased TheGrio, a website dedicated to African American interests, in 2016, before acquiring Sports.TV, an OTT sports streaming service, in 2017. One of the bigger acquisitions was the reported $300 million purchase of The Weather Channel in March 2018. The following year, it was announced that Allen held equity in the Diamond Holding Group, established as part of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s deal to purchase 21 Fox regional sports networks. Allen was described as an “equity and content partner” in the transaction, giving Allen access to networks running games for 42 professional sports teams at a time when networks were racing to acquire live sports due to on-demand viewing crushing live TV. This marked the start of the Allen Media Group’s TV network acquisitions, necessitating the creation of Allen Media Broadcasting, which acquired as many as 28 broadcast TV stations in 21 markets (assorted ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates), which he was putting up for sale in an effort to offload debt. (A sale of stations in 10 of those markets was made in August 2025 for $171 million.)
In talking about the logistics of what that means, Allen broke down how lucrative this kind of TV real estate can be. “In the last political cycle,” Allen explained, “we did almost $100 million just in politicals. Get your mind around that. It’s not that big of a station group and the stations that I’m keeping — they did 93-94% of that nearly $100 million in political money the last political cycle in 2024, the presidential one.” That’s the kind of money you can make when you own a decent swath of the local television market during a particularly hot period politically.
It was in 2023 that Allen started taking bigger swings. Saying that “capital isn’t an issue,” Allen was looking to purchase the linear affiliate channels for ABC, FX, and the National Geographic Channel from Disney for $10 billion that September. “I have access to plenty of capital,” Allen declared, explaining that “there’s trillions of dollars out there looking for a safe place to invest and get it back with a return.” That December, Allen hit Paramount Global with a $3.5 billion bid to acquire BET and VH1, before the Allen Media Group sought to purchase Paramount Global for $30 billion (including its debt) in January 2024. None of these offers were accepted, but they highlighted just how serious Allen was about acquiring larger pieces of the Hollywood puzzle.
This all led to March 2026, when Allen purchased an almost 11% stake in Starz for $25 million, in the form of 1.8 million shares. When asked about the purchase, Allen simply said that he wants to “control” Starz, which reportedly put together a “poison pill” plan in an effort to “ward off hostile or unwelcome acquisition efforts” by allowing shareholders to purchase stock at a 50% discount if any single shareholder were to hold 17.5% of the company, hoping to stave off any individual from becoming too powerful. They would likely want to then force a conversation to better understand Allen’s intentions, which, as he put it, are to “control” the cable channel, home to the fifth and final season of Power Book III: Raising Kanan.
Allen spoke of a specific framework, one that points to the importance of owning and operating the pipeline for distribution. “SVOD, subscription video on-demand, and AVOD, advertising video on-demand,” Allen said. “A left hook and a right hook. If you have a strong left hook and a strong right hook, you’ll be the heavyweight champion for many years to come.” He broke it down more clearly to Variety, revealing who the true opposition is: “We are chasing YouTube,” he said. “They are the ultimate streamer. That same content sitting at YouTube can also be distributed with us.”
So, what’s Allen’s plan? With his decades of experience creating monetizable, family-friendly content for syndication across local and streaming TV networks, it sounds like he is amassing the tools to take on YouTube, the behemoth that stands toe-to-toe with Netflix while feeding Hollywood. The problem? The content still has to hit. Being in Colbert’s old timeslot is great, but if TV ratings continue to drop, what will Allen and CBS’s game plan be for the rest of this contract? Grin and bear it? And if the content he is creating (or purchasing) to program a Starz — or whatever network he’d create to battle YouTube — is wack? Have you actually watched Comics Unleashed? For an audience trained on decades of late-night programming — the school of Carson, if you will — an Allen-hosted comedians’ roundtable doing 7 p.m. cruise ship routines doesn’t feel like the move. How can he push the needle if the people aren’t watching?
None of that may matter to Allen, apparently. These moves seem to be a bumrush of bids and risks in an effort to see what sticks. In the meantime, he continues to profit from the networks he owns while plotting the next steps in his eventual Hollywood takeover. Hopefully, he hires some creatives to help make these moves entertaining.
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