How ViacomCBS' New Streaming Head is Taking Lessons from Pluto TV to Transform Paramount+

Tom Ryan likes being underestimated and over-delivering, he says. He's spent nearly a decade working in free streaming TV as co-founder and CEO of Pluto TV. And today, the newly minted ViacomCBS streaming head will see whether he can pull it off as his company's all-purpose subscription streamer, Paramount+, officially rolls out to consumers. The service formerly known as CBS All Access, which includes live news and sports programming along with on-demand entertainment programming, will cost $9.99 for new subscribers as an ad-free tier ahead of a $4.99 ad-supported tier that will debut in June. Paramount+, which offers up live news and sports programming along with a catalogue of movies and TV shows, is the hat ViacomCBS is tossing into the streaming ring as consumers continue to gravitate toward over-the-top entertainment options and as media companies jostle for market share of the still-surging streaming business opportunity. For Ryan, the curtain-lifting on the new service is an official new era and one of his first major orders of business since being elevated to president and CEO of ViacomCBS's streaming division in October. And he is keen on taking the lessons he learned since co-founding Pluto TV (which now reaches 43 million monthly active users) and applying them to the subscription streaming world. “At Pluto TV, we saw an opportunity for a lot of contrarian insights to try to differentiate the streaming offer: We were linear at the time of on-demand, we were free at the time of subscription and we were ad-supported at the time when people thought advertising would go away in streaming,” Ryan said in an interview with Adweek ahead of Paramount+'s roll-out. “I am looking to bring those contrarian insights, and not just my insights, but that philosophy of doing things differently, to our streaming group." Some of that philosophy is evident in several features on the new service. Live, linear-like channels “seemed counterintuitive at the time” that Pluto introduced them, Ryan said, but they encouraged easy viewing and content discovery on the platform, Ryan said; those same kinds of interest-based digital linear channels will eventually be available on Paramount+ to help encourage easy content discovery. There’s also a big focus on trying to build Paramount+ out to be as widely appealing as possible, with content offerings for all types of viewers—another page ripped straight out of the Pluto TV playbook. Remember Free TV? It’s Coming Back in a Big Way “A lot of the success we found at Pluto was having a broad content offering, having broad categories of content and channels, but also not always thinking about just trying to please the West and the East coasts, the media analysts or press,” Ryan said. In Paramount+'s catalogue, “there’s really something for everyone in the household in a service that we think will appeal to folks across all parts of the country," he said. 'Do no harm' Ryan's full influence on Paramount+ has been somewhat limited since he came into the role in October long after executives had already laid early plans to transform and expand their existing streamer, CBS All Access. “My first view was the Hippocratic oath, do no harm, because there’s so many good things already going on with our strategy and our offer,” said Ryan, who heaped praise on the streaming group assembled during the restructure. The already-laid groundwork has presented him with a somewhat unusual hurdle. “So many things were done right that it’s a challenge to come up with the next great idea,” Ryan said. Paramount+ is not starting from scratch, and has a foundation from CBS All Access, which has been on the market since 2014. (CBS All Access and Showtime already have nearly 30 million subscribers globally, the company said last week.) To make the service attractive to even more consumers, executives have been huddling to fine-tune the approach, which they detailed at length last week to investors during a three-hour investor presentation. Everything Old Is New Again, and 6 Other Takeaways from ViacomCBS’ Paramount+ Event “We really took a hard look at how we could all lean in together and align on making this the most successful paid service that we could," Ryan said. Out of those conversations came more Paramount+ content, including a live-action series adapted from the video game series Halo that Showtime had been working on for several years, but was rerouted to the new service. In all, Paramount+ has 50 new originals planned for release in the next two years, which the company hopes will help drive interest in sign-ups, and almost all of those shows are pulled from ViacomCBS’ owned franchises, like a Frasier revival, several new Star Trek spinoffs and Rugrats reboot. A big chunk of those programming plans also includes reality, which Ryan says is “a lot bigger than a lot of people think.” Executives are also hoping that news and sports will drive consumers to the service. “We’re very focused on the types of content that we think will drive subscriber growth,” Ryan said. “Sports does that, lots of originals tied to our known franchises and IP and brands do that. And then we keep them in there with content that engages them—and that’s where the 30,000 episodes that cannot be replicated by other streaming services come into play.” Since that approach can only work if customers know to check out the service, ViacomCBS has pulled out all the stops to market Paramount+, including using the Super Bowl to cap off its first phase of marketing before blanketing ViacomCBS properties with more content-forward marketing. The company has also looked to leverage its Pluto TV footprint to drive interest in the new service, and on Tuesday, a Paramount Preview channel debuted on Pluto, highlighting the kinds of programming that will be available on the service. While the results aren’t in for the new Pluto channel, prior examples have paid off for the company: Showtime debuted the first episode of the Bryan Cranston-led Your Honor on Pluto TV through a similar preview channel, which drove more traffic to Showtime than the premiere episode’s release on YouTube, Ryan said. According to recent surveys, there’s modest interest in the new service. About 29% of U.S. adults said they were likely to subscribe to Paramount+, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted in mid-February—a touch lower than the 30% of respondents who said they were interested in new streamer Discovery+ and about twice as much as 16% who said they would subscribe to HBO Max ahead of those services’ debuts. Content from Paramount Pictures, Showtime and CBS were most likely to make unlikely subscribers change their mind to check out the new service, according to the poll results. Today marks “the starting line, not the finish line,” Ryan said. The executive will be keeping an eye on how consumers are engaging, how the product is working and ensuring that the rollout is as smooth as possible. Once any initial fires are put out, subscriber growth will become a key metric to understanding how the service is doing to meet ViacomCBS' expectations. “I am confident, given the alignment that we have as an organization behind this product, that it’s going to be extremely successful over time, and be one of the key streaming services that everyone needs in their streaming bundle,” Ryan said.