Paramount CEO David Ellison offered a mantra Thursday that applies to many of its businesses, but especially streaming: “We’re not going to be afraid of technology; we’re going to embrace it.”
He and other top execs emphasized the company’s tech-forward stance throughout a press conference held in New York barely three hours after the close of the companies’ $8.4 billion merger on Thursday.
Ellison said Paramount is “open for business” in streaming. A number of strategic options are on the table, including joint ventures, in the wake of the just-closed $8.4 billion Skydance-Paramount deal. He 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.
“We’re starting from a remarkable place in the streaming business,” he said, citing the strength of programming like Taylor Sheridan’s shows and the NFL. He called streaming “critical for the success of the business” given the free fall of linear cable. Accordingly, he added, “We’re going to invest in the content.”
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Ellison and four other senior execs met the media for the first time since July 2024, having kept mum during the long and complicated regulatory process. During that time, a number of press reports have circulated about Paramount talking to Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and other streaming players about various team-up scenarios. Asked about the state of those discussions, Ellison said, “We have no commitments at this time.”
Paramount+, a reboot of the former CBS All Access that has gone through myriad changes, including the onboarding of Showtime’s formerly separate service, ended the second quarter with 77.7 million subscribers. That was down from 79 million in the January-to-March frame, a sizable number but not in the top echelon of streaming. Pluto TV has traveled a similar trajectory. It pioneered the idea of FAST after launching in 2014 but has in recent years been eclipsed by rivals like Tubi and the Roku Channel.
Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of Skydance financial backer RedBird Capital, returned to Ellison’s point about the primacy of programming. He said the crossroads where traditional media companies find themselves requires a different mindset than the one most companies adopted in the past.
“This is not a ‘nice to have’ – this is a ‘need to have’ moment in Hollywood,” he intoned. “You have a balkanized situation between technology and content, between Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the opportunity here is to actually start to blend that, and that’s what needs to happen.”
It wasn’t clear whether Cardinale’s next comment was an intentional nod to the famous pronouncement of Sumner Redstone, the late architect of the Paramount Global empire, or his daughter, Shari, who presided over the sale to Skydance. If it was, he didn’t cite them by name. “Everyone talks about content being king, right?” Cardinale said. “I would tell you, and I’ve been doing this for 35 years, we’re just now at the moment where content has a chance to be king. But if you don’t re-underwrite the way this content is monetized … you’re not gonna get there.”
To the point about the tech imperative, Paramount President Jeff Shell said a lot of the “plumbing at this company needs to get fixed,” with those improvements enabling the company to excel in streaming. “That’s not as sexy” as some other elements of the takeover, he added, but “very necessary when you run a company of this size.”
Along with data systems and back-end improvements, COO and Chief Strategy Officer Andy Gordon said the user interfaces, which have lagged behind others in the industry, will get a significant overhaul. Paramount+ and Pluto are “our first face to the world,” Gordon said. “We want to make sure that is the best experience for the user as possible.”
Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, is the billionaire chairman of Oracle, said if Hollywood companies have to keep the bar high in terms of execution. “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.”
