FEATURE
THE NEED TO LEAN BACK George Jarrett talks to Pluto TV European MD Olivier Jollet about being a part of Viacom and the immense value of being free to consumers
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iacom’s recent acquisition of Pluto TV for $340 million makes it an independent subsidiary of a global media empire active in 180 countries, and one of the best bits of business Viacom president and CEO Bob Bakish has ever pulled off. Pluto delivers 100+ channels and thousands of on-demand movies in the US, working with over 130 content partners, and it has the proud stat of 12 million monthly users. To get a fuller picture of the master of free streaming, TVBEurope spoke to Olivier Jollet, who joined Pluto TV in 2016 as part of the acquisition of the German OTT service Quazer, of which he was co-founder. He is now managing director, Europe for Pluto TV. A view of the acquisition could be that even Viacom could not have instigated and repeated what Pluto TV has achieved for the money paid. How does Jollet summarise the respective benefits for both parties? “It is a perfect match, and a fantastic success story for us. We share exactly the same visions and have complementary assets. And we can help Viacom build its OTT business and its direct to consumer business. At the same time there are all the assets it is bringing in the balance – the structure of a big corporation,” he says. “It is a fantastic help for Pluto, which is essentially still a start-up.” “There are many free areas for Pluto where we can massively leverage the fact that we now belong to Viacom, and the first one is the content,” he adds. “It is obvious
10 | TVBEUROPE MAY 2019
when you run an OTT service, it is all about content. Viacom is a fantastic licensor, and it has many thousands of programme hours that have not been licensed to some of the streaming services. “They have fantastic brands like Paramount, and Channel 5 in the UK, and it is obvious we are going to benefit from all the Viacom assets. We are currently working out what we may bring and what Viacom brings,” Jollet continues. “We are going to keep our strategy, which is working with everybody in the industry, focusing on launching new thematic channels, and increasing massively the quality and quantity of the content available on our platform.” How often does Pluto TV get asked to put up experimental or short-term event-linked channels? “The pop-up channel is a trend. Being a digital service you can play with that, which is the beauty of digital versus broadcast. Traditional and very conservative broadcasters find that change is a big process to manage, but a digital service can launch a pop up channel because something happened yesterday,” says Jollet. When it comes to specific content what did Pluto TV do in the UK, for example? “We launched a lot of very famous series, like Unsolved Mysteries, which had been popular 20 years ago. And we build the pop-up channels around those cult series. People in the UK are watching that kind of content like crazy, because we play with the nostalgia of users.”