Olivier Jollet Talks Pluto TV Curation, Partnerships

Olivier Jollet opened the third edition of the FAST Festival, discussing how Pluto TV is curating its stable of FAST channels, trends in AVOD and the importance of partnerships as the platform has scaled its global footprint.

Jollet, executive VP and international general manager at Pluto TV, took part in a keynote conversation with Mansha Daswani, the editor-in-chief of World Screen, that you can view in its entirety here.

Pluto TV launched in the U.S. 11 years ago as an early pioneer in the FAST space and has scaled its presence to some 35-plus territories across four continents, delivering 700,000 hours of content. Paramount’s acquisition of the platform in 2019 “was a game changer,” Jollet said. “We were able to benefit from a global footprint, amazing content, iconic franchises, brands and IPs. That’s been facilitating the international rollout.”

While the backing of a global media company has been transformative, having a local approach in each of its key markets has been paramount. “Local doesn’t always mean local content. It means content that fits the audience. It could be American, could be British, could be a specific genre. Before we launch in any country, we ensure we have a strong offering. To reach this strong offering, we also secure big deals with local players.”

These partners have included Viaplay, TV Azteca, ZDF and Mediawan, alliances that have “enabled us to bring this relevance that is needed when you launch a new service in the market.”

Distribution partnerships have also been core to Pluto TV’s expansion strategy, Jollet noted, including with telcos.

Pluto TV has also been aligning with strong local players to drive ad sales, Jollet explained, including Sky in the U.K.

“Whether it’s content, advertising or distribution, it is key to scale a business to have the right partners on your side. We now have more than 400 partners that trust us [with their content] on the platform. We belong to Paramount and have access to this incredible content, but we remain a third-party aggregator platform. We don’t have a lot of partners that have left us—that’s a good sign as well.”

The conversation moved to consumption differences across live and on-demand viewing. Pluto TV launched to fill a need for lean-back entertainment in streaming, Jollet said, at a time when SVOD was emerging as the dominant consumption model.

“After a couple of years, we noticed that the same constraint that you have on linear television was appearing on streaming, which is that the user missed the beginning of a movie and they want to start over, or they may want to bookmark to watch later. Our core DNA is linear and we’re very proud of that, but we need to provide what the users want, which is a catch-up zone. So, we started to build, in our UX, two different sections.”

Scaling the on-demand section has been a core area of focus the last few years, Jollet said, “both from a content acquisition standpoint, as well as from the UX standpoint. There’s a lot of communication between the two worlds. So, you watch something on-demand, but maybe you want to watch more lean-back or vice versa. You arrive in the middle of a movie and want to start from the beginning. It’s been a huge effort for us to put those two worlds together but having one thing in mind, which is simplicity. That’s what we promise to our users. Simple access to content. We don’t want the users to search for ages. The primary mission of Pluto TV, at the beginning, was solving the paradox of choice. If you add a lot of on-demand content, you can re-create the paradox of choice. So, we’ve been working a lot with our designers to build the best UX possible and a world where live TV and on-demand are communicating.”

The majority of consumption is still happening on the FAST channels, Jollet said, even amid the expansion of the on-demand slate. As for the optimal size of a FAST channel slate, Jollet noted: “We don’t want to have too many channels. At the same time, we want every single channel to be self-explanatory and therefore, when you see it, you know what to expect, especially when you go into a specific niche or fandom. It’s always about finding the balance.”

There are, of course, KPIs to indicate whether a channel should be kept: namely, watch time per user, frequency of viewing and total users. “If we start seeing those KPIs decreasing, then we need to do something. That could be refreshing the content or changing the programming strategy. If the trend keeps going in that direction, then it’s probably time to kill the channel. And it’s OK.”

Channels are routinely culled, Jollet said, “so the number is not set. We do a lot of pop-up channels. It is a dynamic offering. We have around 100 to 200 channels in our international markets; around 150 to 200 seems to be a pretty good number.”

The conversation then moved to the very active FAST space for sports channels, particularly niche services. Pluto TV has been scaling its sports offering through partnerships, including with DAZN on darts tournament coverage.

“You can have a healthy business model and collaborative approach with different streamers, both paid and free. Sponsors want to have maximum visibility. For them, it’s good to have a platform like Pluto TV offering a big tournament for free. It gives more exposure to their brands on the big screen.”

Jollet also referenced Pluto TV’s recent deal with All Women’s Sports Network (AWSN), co-founded by Whoopi Goldberg, which includes handball match coverage, MMA, Thai boxing and more.

“The common point is they all feed a specific fandom. The darts fans. The women’s sports fans. The handball fans. They are well-defined audiences. Very active on social. And obviously the fact that we are able to provide this amazing content for free, live, makes a big difference for the fans and creates a lot of virality as well.”

Discovery remains the biggest challenge for all platforms, Jollet said. Pluto TV’s answer to that conundrum lies in its focus on simplicity. “Making sure the user doesn’t spend 40 minutes to find their next piece of entertainment. It’s all about content discovery. That’s why FAST has become so popular. We are taking the burden of choosing for the users. We have a great team, we have great data and we know what you’re going to like. Tune into the channels and let us do the programming for you. But that’s not sufficient in the world we live in today. We need to go beyond that because we have on-demand. That’s where AI will play a fantastic role in helping the content discovery.”

There are lots of opportunities to deploy AI at a streaming platform, Jollet continued, including in recommendation algorithms, curation and more. “It will help at a lot of different levels in the value chain of a streaming service. Besides also helping efficiencies, marketing and all of that. There are a lot of applications for how AI is going to make the lives of users better and help the decision-making, which I think is the $1 billion question. How to make the users decide in a few seconds what to watch. That’s where I’m very enthusiastic about the capability that AI is going to bring for the user.”

The CTV advertising opportunity is still growing, Jollet said, as clients come around to the benefits of a digital campaign. “Over 90 percent of our consumption is happening on the TV set,” Jollet explained. “It is full-screen, non-skippable, audio-on. We’re not talking about skippable ads after five seconds. We’re talking about ad breaks that the users watch on the TV. They don’t see the difference whether it’s served via a digital signal. From a user perspective, there is no differentiation. Except you can personalize for the users. You have way more data. You can offer a better ad experience because it’s a digital product. It is actually TV advertising. CTV is something that the industry created, but it is TV ads that we’re doing.”

Established free-TV broadcasters are leading the charge on CTV ad gains in Europe with their streaming platforms, Jollet noted. Now, the SVOD players are joining the market. “The advertisers go where the eyeballs are, and the eyeballs are going more into the digital world. Therefore, advertising is expected to shift drastically to CTV now.”

Pluto TV’s programming teams tap into the well of data available to the platform to better understand audience needs and inform the stunts the channels feature throughout the year.

“It’s really about analyzing what they want and what they don’t want. It helps our content acquisition department. Data is everything when you run a streaming service. Everyone on our team is a kind of data analyst, whether they’re in marketing, content partnerships or a channel curator. Everyone is able to interpret the data with the help of our data analytics team. That’s what helped us to also find some hidden gems.”

Discussing the emergence of FAST as a buzzword and the market’s subsequent cooling, Jollet noted that there was a rush to market of “fake,” hastily cobbled-together channels.

“That was not good for the business. A FAST channel requires quality and quantity. You can’t build a FAST channel with a playlist. We’ve been focusing on the quality more than the quantity. We’re making sure that every single channel is getting better and bigger with stronger IPs and so on.”

That has included “shorter windowing, more fresh content, live content like sports,” Jollet said, plus select originals, with Jollet referencing as an exa

mple a dating show produced with Tinder in Brazil for MTV and Pluto TV.

“Those kinds of examples show how the market is evolving. More collaboration with brands. More creative advertising concepts. We are making sure we are bringing innovation in the way we work: for the end users, in the way we do our content acquisition and strategy in the product and changing the UX. We’re scaling the niches and making sure we capture the audience. I push the team to think out of the box.”

The session wrapped with a discussion about Pluto TV’s overall perspective on partnerships, which have long been a “key pillar” in the platform’s strategy.

“Usually big local players have a great pipeline of local content and are the leading ad-sales house in their market. So, we’ve been trying to develop those 360 partnerships.”

For example, the deal with Viaplay covers marketing, distribution, ad sales and content. “We are the catch-up service of Viaplay in the Nordics. We get the content day and date. We even co-premiered one of their reality shows, Paradise Hotel, on the same day as Viaplay. The alliance of two players helps consolidate the market, which is good for advertisers and good for users.”

Pluto TV is similarly working with M6 in France as well as smart-TV manufacturers like Samsung TV Plus and LG. “We need to collaborate to bring more value.”