Pluto TV is revamping the user interface of its video on-demand (VOD) library as the free, ad-supported streamer looks to capitalize on growing consumption of the platform’s offerings, TheWrap has learned.
The redesign features a modernized user interface as well as enhanced functionality, with improvements including a hero carousel, personalized and trending content recommendations and horizontal browse categories. The new layout will also streamline the Continue Watching feature, making it easier for viewers to pick up where they left off.
The redesign has been piloted across Apple tvOS and Android TV and will be rolling out on Amazon Fire TV this week.
Pluto, which is a profitable, $1 billion-in-revenue-per-year business and whose majority of consumption comes from its live linear channels, has generated a record 5.6 billion total viewing hours, up 5% year over year. (The company declined to disclose the exact breakdown between live linear and VOD hours generated.)
Overall, the platform accounted for just 0.7% of streaming’s overall 41% share of usage in Nielsen’s Gauge report the month of September. However, the company noted that VOD is growing “significantly faster” on a percentage basis than linear, driven by increased consumption due to more available content with thousands of films and episodes added each month, enhanced discoverability and a better user experience.
“We’ve recognized that our overall consumption has grown substantially on VOD content consumption. A big growth area has been facilitated and recognized on the on demand side,” Pluto TV product management SVP Tad Ro told TheWrap. “We’ve been scaling our catalog tremendously to make more available content on our service. So how do we make sure that content discovery from our users can go deep into our content catalog? That’s what is supported in the new on demand experience.”
Ro said Pluto TV will continue to evolve its VOD experience, with themed content collections and “spotlights” as a way of emphasizing specific pieces of content. It will also roll out a filter in its search function that will allow users looking for VOD content to differentiate between movies and TV shows.
Pluto TV users should also expect to have more control over their live linear channel viewing experience in the future, with the platform planning to roll out more capabilities within its Electronic Program Guide (EPG), Ro teased.
“We have hundreds of channels that we’re offering within the EPG grid, but that very traditional view of an EPG sometimes can be very cumbersome to get through to very quickly discover what’s inside all the content,” he said. “So there’s going to be some forthcoming features that allow ways to actually quickly get through browsing some of the what’s in the channels themselves, but also ways to surface and allow users to customize the channels that are most important to them.”
He added that the product team is working on better discovery of on-demand content in the live linear experience.
“The linear experience has always been this lean-back, passive experience. But as you can imagine, it’s all time based. So if you start watching the linear channels and you’re in the middle of a piece of content when you first open up the app, how are we letting the user know they can watch this from the beginning and giving them the option to do that?” Ro said. “We already have some of those features today within the content details pages or within the player itself, but how do they actually see that when they’re browsing through the EPG? So that’s where our next step is, because there’s a lot of users who only stay in the linear experience and actually utilize the EPG as their navigation to browse for more channels. But we want to let people know, even in the EPG experience, that we might have this content available on the on-demand side to actually bridge them over.”
While artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are currently being utilized for content recommendations and ranking, Ro revealed that Pluto is also working on “conversational search” with generative AI as a way of improving its search function, which it plans on testing and rolling out next year.
“It’s definitely an area that we want to utilize the lean backness of our service and provide less friction to discover content,” he said.
The evolution of Pluto comes as Paramount Global is slated to merge with David Ellison’s Skydance Media in a $8 billion deal slated to close in the first half of 2025.
RedBird Capital Partners’ Jeff Shell, who is expected to serve as president of New Paramount, has previously referred to Pluto as a “very strong and powerful asset,” while the private equity firm’s partner Andy Gordon said that a merged Skydance and Paramount sees an opportunity in the tech platforms for Paramount+ and Pluto to drive “a lot more efficiency” and “further cash flow generation.”
“Right now, we’re maintaining our separate paths. I think the plans for the area of convergence is not exactly clear,” Ro said when asked if Pluto could get merged or have a dedicated section within Paramount+. “But in the meantime, our focus has been really within the context of knowing Pluto has a lot to do on the FAST linear experience.”
