IBC 2024: Pivot to Streaming Paying Off, Says Paramount Global CTO Wiser
Paramount Global is under the pump and about to be sold but its future is bright because it is successfully transferring systems from production to distribution in the Cloud, according to the company’s Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Phil Wiser.
Nearly all of Paramount’s enterprise systems have shifted to cloud including video-intensive tools, systems, and asset storage, Wiser said addressing the IBC Show in a keynote of CTO Perspectives.
“The transition to the cloud facilitates more downstream fluidity and opens opportunities to better exploit assets,” said Wiser, who called on fellow legacy media companies to fully grasp the opportunity provided by Cloud, Virtualization, and AI.
“Broadcast and streaming need to converge to support the economics of the wider business,” Wiser said. “You cannot afford to sit on proprietary hardware and dedicated networks. The internet is the most robust media distribution system ever built. All broadcasters and studios should adopt an internet-first mindset.”
He said lessons had been learned by Hollywood from seeing the fate that befell the record publishing business which fought rather than partnered with digital upstarts like iTunes and failed to switch to streaming models in time.
“Major media companies, like Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, see ourselves much more as internet-based community businesses at this point,” he said. “The issue is that the exact timing of when consumers are going to move en mass online is very hard to predict.”
Wiser was also in an IBC session, giving updates about the progress of the studio’s collective vision to evolve into the Cloud by 2030. This is not an easy task, especially as studios confront the blunt end of the proposed transition: production.
“We’re seeing significant shifts in areas like animation, whereas cloud-based production remains a work in progress,” Wiser reported.
Phil Wiser, far right, at the IBC Conference
For MovieLabs 2030 Vision to succeed there must be an agreed, interoperable set of tools such as security protocols and a standard language in order to streamline production and distribution in the cloud for the good of the entire community. Doing that from a position in which every single production at every studio (let alone across studios) is completely unique underlines the ambition of the project and the scale of the gap that remains.
Wiser said the transition to online can be managed astutely with the right blend of technology, business and, crucially, of content.
“What everyone's reacting to right now is the uncertainty about how quickly the core consumer business will shift wholesale online.”
While Paramount Global reported a $5.99bn write-down of its cable business in its recent quarter and is shuttered its TV division as a cost-cutting prelude to being taken over by Skydance Media, Wiser insisted its streaming strategy was working.
Its DTC business gained profitability for the first time last quarter as numbers swung $450m year-on-year to $26m. Streaming revenue climbed 13% to $1.9bn, subscription revenue grew 12%, and advertising revenue climbed 16% to $513m, reflecting growth from Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
Paramount’s shift to public cloud is being done in concert with AWS. Wiser shared the IBC stage with Girish Bajaj, VP, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios Technology.
Bajaj was in charge of Amazon’s recent rollout of a new UEX powered by AI intended to streamline and enhance the overall content discovery experience with more personalized recommendations.
“We want them to have more control over their streaming appearance. We think that's the way to reshape the future of entertainment video,” Bajaj says.
“We have to ensure an equally positive experience for all types of content, whether that’s a series or a movie or a live event and whether that member is in a city or the countryside. We spend a lot of time obsessing about building a high-quality streaming experience that works at scale. A global streaming product is not easy to do. It is very complex, and we build features for every single content type.”
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