Pluto TV’s CEO Tom Ryan Grabs Starring Role In The New ViacomCBS

The official announcement that CBS and Viacom will merge into a $30 billion global media company came with a graphic highlighting 16 of the the soon-to-be-combined ViacomCBS’s most important media brands.

Most are venerable media outlets like CBS, Showtime, Paramount Pictures and MTV, but Pluto TV is a new-media newcomer that wouldn’t even have been on the list if the merger had come before 2019. Viacom acquired Pluto TV in January for just $340 million — roughly 1 percent of the value of the merged company — and the free, ad-supported streaming service is getting bigger by the minute.

Viacom CEO Bob Bakish said during his quarterly earnings call last week with investment analysts that Pluto TV has 18 million monthly active users — up from 12 million when Viacom acquired the service in January. Pluto TV has added or announced 27 Viacom-branded channels to the U.S. service since the acquisition, launched 11 Pluto Latino channels in July, and is already hinting at CBS channels to come.

Pluto CEO and co-founder Tom Ryan spoke with Decider to talk about the company’s quick rise at Viacom and his thoughts on why free, ad-supported streaming is quietly taking hold while Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and HBO Max prepare to duke it out for paid subscribers.

DECIDER: Tell me how Pluto TV’s deal with Viacom happened. Were you already working with Viacom when those discussions started?

TOM RYAN: We had been working with Viacom on a limited basis for some content from Paramount Pictures and were getting to know their executive team better. We were not looking to sell the company at the time, but we concluded there was a lot we could do with Viacom to accelerate our position as the leader in free-streaming TV.

You suddenly had great access to MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, etc.

Viacom has iconic brands and a vast library of TV programming that it had held back from other streaming services to possibly develop its own streaming service. Viacom also has a large sales force that sells billions of dollars in advertising every year, and they’ve got great relationships with distributors around the world. Those five things — content, brands, distribution, advertising and international — were very compelling, and we saw Viacom wanting to make free-streaming TV a really big part of their digital ambitions.

Have you offloaded your ad sales into Viacom to focus more on product?

We have about 30 people on our revenue team — ad operations, programmatic, and building direct ad sales — and have been working closely with Viacom ad sales. Pluto TV was one of the centerpieces of Viacom’s upfront ad sales this year, so it’s much more of a partnership than simply offloading ad sales to Viacom.

Viacom properties have been a big focus of your content development since the acquisition?

Yes. Only eight weeks after the deal closed, we launched 14 new Viacom-branded channels. Not long after that, we launched Pluto Latino with 11 channels. And we just announced that we’re adding 13 more channels this summer from MTV and other Viacom channels.

Pluto TV integrated into some cable platforms. How important is that in your overall distribution plan?

It’s very important. We’re available now on Comcast’s Xfinity X1 box and Cox’s Contour platform. On the international side, we’ve been adding Viacom content to the products we already had in Germany and the U.K. We’ve been adding Pluto TV channels to My5, which is part of Viacom’s Channel 5 in the U.K. Early next year, we’re going to launch a new offering for Latin America.

Has the rollout of Viacom channels been driven more by marketing or by how quickly you could get individual channel deals done?

We work closely with Viacom on programming strategy based on what we’ve felt like Pluto TV users would like and then worked with the individual networks to develop the channels. We’re doing branded channels and also some popup channels like we’re doing with the MTV The Hills channel with library episodes of that show to support the launch of The Hills: New Beginnings.

Are you fairly deep into discussions with other media companies about new channels, or will Pluto TV take on the look of a Viacom-branded service over time?

Pluto TV partners with NBC, Sky, CBS, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and a lot of other partners, and we closed a major deal with CNN after the Viacom acquisition of Pluto TV. We have new deals with the BBC and Major League Soccer. We’ve got more than 150 channels, and only 30 of those are Viacom channels. Pluto TV is a broad-based aggregator and distributor with Viacom as a new and significant content partner and our parent company, but the broad base of content is what makes Pluto compelling to consumers.

Pluto TV’s scroll of live channels strikes me as an interface that’s there for the comfort of people who are accustomed to cable, but the Netflix-style interface is better for sorting a big variety of content for a big variety of viewers. How are you thinking about user experience?

We started Pluto TV with a contrarian idea that in an age of on-demand — Netflix, YouTube and others — the value of linear programming and the value of ad-supported programming would not go away. Sling and Hulu both launched interesting, next-generation interfaces, and then both came out with programming guides because their subscribers wanted them.

As we add more and more channels, we need to provide more personalization and recommendation to help you get to the channels you like, and we’re working hard on that. I don’t think that scrolling through hundreds of channels is the end state for Pluto TV.

I don’t quite understand the persistence of services with traditional programming guides in a world Netflix has grown to 150 million global subscribers without a programming guide. Is this two different sets of consumers? Do consumers want a programming guide on some services but not on others?

Netflix is an on-demand experience, and Pluto TV is primarily a live experience. If you look at our on-demand offering, it looks a lot like Netflix and other services. On-demand offerings tend have tile-based interfaces, but people are used to having a programming guide for live content.

Are Roku and Amazon Fire TV the dominant platforms where viewers are watching Pluto TV?

Those are important partners for us, but we’re big on a lot of TV platforms. We’re built-in as a default service for Visio’s WatchFree product. We provide a large number of the channels on Samsung’s TV Plus product. We’re built directly into the platforms for a lot of smart TVs.

How to people watch Pluto TV? Do they typically stick with a handful of favorite channels?

Our average session times on connected TVs are two-plus hours, so it’s close to typical TV viewing. People tend to watch more than one channel, and people are watching a lot of movies.

You have Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ from Viacom’s Paramount Digital, which includes a new season that didn’t air when the show was on the Seeso service. How are you thinking about originals?

There’s so much great content out there that we need to curate and deliver to customers that we’re not focused right now on developing originals. I wouldn’t rule it out in the future.

What else does Viacom put you in position to do? I could imagine a Top Gun channel next year when Top Gun: Maverick premieres.

We’ve already started doing that as I mentioned earlier with The Hills, and we just launched Dora TV to support the new movie Dora and the Lost City of Gold. We had already been doing pop-up channels before the acquisition, but now with Viacom we’ve got a lot of opportunities to support big launches and give viewers a resource for reacquainting themselves with those brands.

Is it too soon to say how your role and Pluto’s role will change in a combined ViacomCBS?

[Laughs.] Definitely too soon.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider and is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.