Olivier Jollet on Entertaining the Planet With Pluto TV

Nicole Bitette: Pluto TV is the #1 free, ad-supported streaming service. To what do you attribute its success?

Olivier Jollet: Pluto TV was founded by Tom Ryan and Ilya Pozin in 2014 to solve the paradox of choice ultimately. The vision was built on three contrarian principles: free in the age of on-demand, linear in the age of subscription, and ad-supported at a time when everyone was predicting the end of the ad-supported model.

The free element has been critical to our expansion. And, the linear approach is really the key differentiator that brought Pluto TV to scale. At the same time, we always tried to have different editorial lines, and that's why users love us.

NB: How did you apply the success of Pluto TV in the U.S. to international markets?

O.J.: When ViacomCBS acquired Pluto TV in 2019, we were already live in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Still, it was just the beginning of this incredible adventure, and many people were wondering 'will it work?"

I think we have the answer now, and it works beyond our expectations! Europe has many high-quality free-to-air channels compared to the USA market, and the cost-cutting movement is also limited in those countries. But Pluto TV has been able to impose its FAST concept across the old Continent, becoming the First Fast service across Europe in less than three years with more than 500 curated channels, a wide distribution, and fantastic content partners such as BBC, A&E, or Mediawan. We have recently accelerated our expansion during the last two years, launching the service in 2020 in LATAM, followed by Spain, France, Brazil, Italy, and Nordics in 2022.

Our secret ingredient? Thematic curated channels created by fans for fans spanning all genres.

NB: What does the recent expansion to Italy mean for the service?

O.J.: Italy is one of the most important markets in Europe for ad sales. The T.V. business is still huge there; they have more than 120 Free-to-air channels, but at the same time, they are transitioning into the new streaming world. In Italy, there are three key elements: free, linear, and ad sales, so Pluto TV couldn't find a better place to be.

We launched Pluto TV in Italy with 40 channels combining great local content and our ViacomCBS library, and, on top of that, we secured a partnership with Sky media that included Pluto TV in their portfolio of brands that they sell for us. In addition, Sky is also our distribution partner for some of our key brands, such as MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon, and will be our leading partner for Paramount+ that we will launch in 2022. The good thing is we'll be able to really levy the ecosystem we are building across free, streaming, and pay.

In the Nordics, we will be taking a different approach. We have announced today a groundbreaking partnership with NENT, the leading entertainment group in the Nordics. We're integrating their existing AVOD platform into Pluto TV, building a world-class FAST AVOD service in the Nordics. Combining the power of NENT from a content, ad sales, and marketing point of view with the power of Pluto TV as a world-leading FAST service successfully live in more than 25 markets across International will be a great launch and a different way of tackling a market. This is definitively a model that we want to export outside Nordics.

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