Paramount Global (formerly ViacomCBS) has decided to maintain its majority stake in BET Media Group five months after putting it up for sale. The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount Global officials reached out to bidders such as Byron Allen and Tyler Perry to notify them that they’re ending the sales process as they concluded that selling the properties would not make a significant change to the company’s bottom line.

Paramount Global wanted $3 billion for a majority stake in BET Media Group, which is comprised of the cable channels BET and VH and the streaming service BET+. The company acquired BET from founder Bob Jonson for $2.7 billion in 2000. However, the New York Post reported on June 20th that the $3 billion asking price was too lofty for bidders. Perry offered $2 billion for BET Media Group and Allen offered $2.7 billion per Josh Kosman and Alexandra Steigrad of the New York Post on July 27th. Both bids were hundreds of millions of dollars short of what Paramount Global wanted for the black-centric properties and had no intentions of lowering the asking price.

Paramount Global put BET, and other properties, up for sale in an attempt to lower its $15.6 billion in debt. The company wants to increase its investment in its streaming service Paramount+. For the company to generate significant gains from a BET sale, it needed to get about eight times the current $325 million in Ebitda (or Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) for the BET Media Group. Paramount Global valued the majority stake at ten times the Ebitda, which caused Paramount to ask for a higher amount to acquire the properties.

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The sale of BET was of interest to members of the HBCU community due to the possibility of programming about black colleges as well as black college sports games being broadcasted on the channel and streaming services. Byron Allen’s ownership of HBCU Go and current broadcast agreement with SWAC, CIAA, MEAC, and SIAC was specifically highlighted by HBCU alumni during the bidding process.