[Paramount CEO David Ellison] did not rule out a full merger of subscription service Paramount+ and free, ad-supported Pluto TV after their tech stacks are joined over the next year to 18 months.
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Sounds like it might also have implications for Paramount-owned TV Everywhere networks.
“The company currently operates three streaming services with three separate operating systems on multiple clouds, which is a combination of really ineffective and really inefficient,” he said, with BET+ and other AVOD services also under the tent. “Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete.”
Pluto is very, very profitable; Paramount+ is losing money nonstop. If I'm in their shoes, my end goal is to merge everything into Pluto and have tiers:
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Free Pluto as we know it with streaming stations and a limited set of on-demand content with ads.
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For a fee, expansion to the rest of what we think of as the Paramount+ (and all the other ancillary services that exist for some reason) library with ads, plus maybe some of the (now) Skydance cable stations like Nickelodeon, BET, etc...
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Same thing, but ad-free for on-demand.
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Maybe separate out the sports stuff, especially NFL rights, for an additional add-on charge.
They say 18 months, I say 3 years minimum!
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Since I wrote this, Skydance/Paramount acquired the rights to UFC, making the idea of creating the sports-centric stand-alone option even more likely. They'll need that to either compete against the new stand-alone ESPN or bundle it with the package of that plus Fox One. Basically, it look like they are creating Venu anyway.
Can I also highlight the major TKO swerve-job? Over just a few weeks, not only did they close this deal, but they sold their domestic WWE premium events to ESPN for an exorbitant fee (not even including the historical library, which will be a different deal). Meanwhile, ESPN must have thought this would help them lock up the UFC rights they already had and they'd be the home for all TKO content! That was plain cold...
But anyway, the biggest issue we'll have to deal with is integration. Can we make it work like with EPlusTV, or will it have to be something like ADBTuner? Or will we have to stick with Stream Links to launch apps when events happen or after the fact? No matter what's necessary, I'm not worried because if I know anything about this community, we'll find a way to make it happen!
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