How Pluto TV Benefits From Its Relationship With Paramount (And Vice Versa)

Pluto TV's Jeff Shultz explains how their relationship with Paramount works to both parties advantage, allowing them to create a “flywheel effect” to boost viewership and engagement all around in this Innovators Spotlight video from our report FASTs Are The New Cable.

JEFF SHULTZ: So content... the dump truck backed up and thousands and thousands of hours of premium content comes to Pluto on an exclusive basis.

So not only does it accelerate the flywheel, but it provides a competitive advantage over our peers.

Then in terms of translating the engagement into revenue we are now a part of this global sales team.

As an example of how that plays out, Pluto now has a multi $100 million upfront, right. As an independent company., there's no upfront.

Now we were able to participate in this very, very broad solution driven organization, essentially solving problems for marketers at scale, and Pluto TV can play a critical role in that. It's something we just couldn't have done on our own.

Another example is international, where Pluto TV is in over 30 markets now. We launched Latin America a year after the acquisition. That was a pan-Latin American launch in every market. We were live in a couple of markets—as an independent company our mission was to entertain the planet.

There's no question that we had global ambitions, but there's no way that Pluto as an independent company would have gone so far, so fast internationally.

We were able to leverage the fact that Paramount Global is a truly global company with entertainment presence in virtually every market. And we can leverage that to enhance our scale and to accelerate the business.

So you can imagine how that flywheel, which is already spinning quite quickly, how it's accelerated by the addition of all those factors from Paramount.

Right now there’s a Summer of Movies promotion that Pluto is running, which might sound relatively generic, but it's totally thought out in that we're in this lull between the end of the spring season and the beginning of the fall season. And we have a ton of movie—a super, super compelling, super high profile movie offering. And it's a way for us to draw attention to that, to drive a lot of usage and engagement.

Then the promotional calendar will switch over to promoting the fall debuts. So you'll see a Ghost marathon. Ghost is one of the most popular shows on television right now, a CBS sitcom that will coming back in the fall.

So we absolutely will have those two teams, the CBS programing team and the Pluto TV programing team working in lockstep to make sure that we're entertaining Pluto TV users.

You can't just do something that feels like a commercial. It has to be compelling in and of itself. But it's also inherently promotional, driving people to want to watch the debut of the next season.