Pluto TV will relaunch on the Paramount Plus platform this summer, a move Paramount CEO David Ellison called the streaming service’s most-significant update in a decade. Ellison said Monday the change is meant to give viewers a better user experience, with more-personalized content recommendations.
The move matters because Pluto TV has long been one of Paramount’s most distinctive free products: no subscription, no login required, and access to hundreds of channels and thousands of on-demand shows and movies. Paramount has also been nudging U.S. users to create free accounts, which let streamers build watch lists and sync activity across devices while giving the company better insight into what people actually watch.
That push has already taken hold. More than two-thirds of Pluto TV’s U.S. users are now registered, Ellison said, and registered users in the U.S. rose 60 percent from a year earlier. Paramount will keep pressing for more sign-ups, but the bigger shift is where it wants viewers to spend their time: on video on demand, not just the original linear channels that helped make Pluto TV a name in free streaming.
Pluto TV originally launched as a curated collection of linear streaming channels, and Paramount’s predecessor Viacom bought it in 2019. Last year, reports indicated the company was interested in moving Pluto TV off its own technology stack and onto the one used by Paramount Plus. Ellison did not say Monday whether the two services will remain separate apps for the foreseeable future, leaving open the question of how far the integration will go.
Paramount’s strategy now is clearer than the packaging. The company sees more value in its on-demand library than in linear programming and plans to market that library more aggressively to Pluto TV users. Ellison said video on demand delivers a better overall consumer experience and is more valuable for advertisers because of the intent behind it, while recently added fan-favorite and nostalgia-driven titles are already performing well. He said those titles are resonating with existing Pluto TV users and introducing a new generation of streamers to familiar franchises.
The overhaul comes as Paramount’s streaming platforms accounted for slightly more than 2 percent of all time spent with TV in February, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge report. For a service built to be free and easy to enter, the next step is not just more viewers, but more registered viewers and more time spent in the parts of Pluto TV that Paramount can use to learn, sell and keep them coming back.