Less than 24 hours after then-Viacom and now-ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish announced the acquisition of Pluto TV at the NATPE conference in January 2019, leaders from the streaming service and Viacom’s Americas cluster were already meeting in Miami’s famed Fountainbleu hotel. Huddled in a room, Pierluigi Gazzolo, now president of studios and OTT for ViacomCBS Networks International; Juan Acosta, now president of ViacomCBS Networks Americas; and Pluto TV EVP and Chief Business Officer Jeff Shultz began discussing plans to roll out an expansion of Pluto TV across Latin American.
The no-cost ad-supported service—with its lean-back user experience, seemingly limitless channel lineup, and digital availability—makes an ideal platform for Latin America. In this vast region stretching from Mexico to Argentina, paid TV penetration is low, but mobile adoption and content consumption rates are high.
“We raised our hand immediately and said, ‘Please pick us’ because there were no other products like that in the market,” Acosta remembers. “We thought this would be a perfect product to complement our entire offering for the market.”
On March 25, the efforts that followed that initial meeting culminated in the launch of Pluto TV Latin America in 17 Spanish-speaking countries, with 12,000 hours of content from more than 55 major partners on 24 channels. The service plans to add six to eight channels each month and eventually feature as many as 80, says Acosta. Content partners include ViacomCBS brands Telefe, Paramount, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Nick Jr., as well as entertainment mainstays Lionsgate, BBC, Sony Pictures Television, Fremantle, and many more.
The launch of Pluto TV Latin America is an important part of ViacomCBS’ ambitious expansion of its streaming ecosystem around the world. Vital to this effort is identifying under-served markets and providing easy-to-access content that will resonate with those audiences.
“The future comes in the form of streaming, so we want to prioritize our streaming businesses both in pay and in free,” says Gazzolo. “As a company, ViacomCBS’ agenda has been to always expand on the non-linear businesses, and in the case of free, we'll do it through Pluto TV, and there's not many options like Pluto TV outside of the U.S. Many Latin Americans prefer to watch advertising so they don't have to pay for content. We wanted to take advantage of that and be first-to-market with the uniqueness of the offering of Pluto.”
A coalition of Pluto TV and ViacomCBS Americas employees worked together to identify advertising, programming, and distribution partners. Pluto TV tapped its global networks to determine which partnerships would translate easily to the region, while the Americas team, with their on-the-ground understanding of Latin American audiences and businesses, identified local partners.
“We have these massive distribution relationships with an Amazon or a Roku or a Samsung, together with major content relationships with international networks and studios,” says Shultz. “These partnerships are inherently global and we can extend them into new markets like Latin America. But partnering with a telco in Mexico, or a cable operator in Argentina, or a Latin American content owner requires local knowledge and relationships that Pier, JC, and their team brought to the table. It was this combination of strengths that made the effort a success.”
While Pluto TV Latin America’s user experience is identical to its U.S. counterpart’s, the Americas team, armed with its knowledge of the region’s consumers, provided key insights that helped prioritize mobile over connected television. This became the blueprint for the launch strategy, and Pluto TV prioritized rolling out the service on iOS and Android apps before adapting it later this year to Roku, smart TVs, and other connected devices. Since the service already exists on so many platforms, this was an easy pivot for Pluto TV.
“Pluto TV benefits from being a multi-platform experience that can adapt to and accommodate the viewing and usage patterns of any market,” says Shultz.
“This was a textbook, best-in-class example of how two organizations integrated in less than a year to launch a massive product in 17 countries,” says Acosta. “It’s a testament to how to make things work and come up with great solutions and really utilize the best of each organization to do so.”
One of the challenges of launching an untried concept in a new market is convincing partners that there’s more opportunity than risk. In Pluto TV’s case, this came in the form of convincing media companies to provide their content up front and then divide yet-to-be-earned advertising revenue. It ended up being an easy sell.
“It turns out that's one of the beautiful formulas of Pluto TV is that there is a lot of content out there that studios want to monetize or producers want to monetize, and they don't have a place to monetize them, and so we have been able to get 50-plus partners,” says Gazzolo. “I was so excited to see that we will be able to have all that beautiful content and be able to curate it in a way that makes sense on Pluto TV.”
The next step was lining up programmatic advertisers to feed that monetization. Acosta estimates that they have signed nearly all of the major programmatic partners in the region, including Telaria, SpotX, Column 6, and Smart Adserver.
Pluto TV Latin America also fills an important hole for ViacomCBS’ distribution partners in the region, as it offers a no-cost ad-supported complement to the company’s Paramount Plus and Noggin paid subscription apps. This complete ecosystem should help build a long-term customer base that will eventually subscribe to the paid products—thus creating more value for ViacomCBS’ local distribution partners.
“We're really kind of engaging the MVPD on a complete conversation of ‘how do we retain your subscriber in your ecosystem?’” says Acosta. “You have premium products, you have our pay products, and you have our free products. We’re really providing them a full range of products for the retention and acquisition of subscribers.”
To stoke movement from ad-supported to subscription apps, the Americas team will experiment with windowing. For example, they may use Pluto TV to promote the premiere of sought-after content such as Handmaid’s Tale, Yellowstone, and Killing Eve on Paramount Plus. Then they will add them to Pluto TV’s programming schedule 24 months later.
“Picture a pyramid. At the tip of the pyramid you have your paid, advertising-free services, and at the bottom you have free content that’s supported by advertising,” says Gazzolo. “We constantly want to be able to move our potential clients up the pyramid.”
Pluto TV Latin America offers the same channels across its 17 markets. The content was carefully curated to appeal to consumers across the region.
“Mexico has a different taste than Argentina and than Colombia,” says Gazzolo. “So, Pluto TV Latin America is going to try to keep a balance where you're going to have some content from the Southern Cone, some content from Mexico, some content from Colombia, and content that is for everyone.”
Pluto TV Latin America is also distinct from the Pluto TV Latino product that launched last July in the U.S. Though some content is the same, the content mix reflects cultural differences. Consumers in Latin America, for example, are accustomed to viewing English language content dubbed in Spanish, something that can turn off U.S. viewers.
“We set out to create a product that truly encompasses a user experience in a free space that can be reaching all audiences, all demographics, on all devices,” says Acosta. “Being a one-stop shop of consumption, bingeing and obviously a one-stop partner application that can really help our partners monetize and grow their business.”
The project crystalizes the collaborative power of ViacomCBS brands and divisions coming together to reinforce one another’s strengths - a dynamic that should only amp up as the combined company gels.
“The embrace Pluto TV received from Pier, JC, and their team was overwhelming,” says Shultz. “The Lat Am project was a massive collaborative effort and the teams worked closely for a year to successfully launch. It seemed an outrageous idea in Miami last year, and now it’s a perfect illustration of what we can accomplish together with a shared vision.”
