Following its acquisition by Skydance earlier this year, Paramount has revealed plans to unite its three streaming services Paramount+, Pluto and BET+ under one platform.
Speaking at the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call with analysts, CEO David Ellison revealed the company’s goal “is to become the most technologically capable media company”.
Part of that will involve uniting the three streaming platforms, which are currently three completely independent tech stacks.
“They operate across two different clouds, and there’s no connectivity, obviously, between those businesses currently,” added Ellison. “Convergence is currently underway to basically unite them into one unified platform, which should be done around the middle of next year.”
Paramount has a road map to “significantly improve” the overall product for Paramount+, revealed Ellison. “Again, when you improve products, you get benefits like increasing engagement, your recommendation engine obviously improves dramatically, your ad sale monetisation will improve as you improve the ad tech.”
Ellison went on to discuss artificial intelligence, which he said will have “a significant impact across every business”.
“We obviously feel that frontier technology, working with more traditional machine learning, is going to really impact how things like search, rec, and discovery work on platform. There will be increased efficiencies across the business by deploying those tools, and we also believe it will have an impact on content creation.”
However, Ellison was keen to stress that Paramount views AI as a tool for artists to iterate more quickly and be able to tell better stories. “From that standpoint, we think technology is going to impact all aspects of our business, and we want to be a leader in that space.”
As part of the call, Ellison was asked about the ongoing speculation around Paramount’s interest in acquiring Warner Bros Discovery. While not commenting on the rumours, Ellison told the analysts “there’s no must-haves for us”.
“We really look at this as buy versus build, and we absolutely have the ability to build to get to where we want to go. We believe we can achieve our streaming goals and that we can drive enterprise efficiency and create value in long-term free cash flow generation all through the building standpoint.”
“We’re fortunate that we have the balance sheet to be able to be opportunistic when we think that M&A will accelerate our goals, but we’re also long-term disciplined owner-operators. From that standpoint, we’ll always approach things through the lens of how do we maximise value for shareholders. From an M&A standpoint, it’s always going to be how do we accelerate and improve our North Star principles?”
Ellison concluded by reaffirming Paramount’s commitment to accelerating innovation by making technology a core competency of the company. “Competitors from Silicon Valley have quickly expanded into media and broader forms of entertainment, and if we want to remain competitive long-term, we must strengthen our technology and do what it takes to position ourselves as the industry’s most technologically capable media company,” he said.
“Again, I want to stress that technology at Paramount is not and never will be a replacement for human creativity. Rather, it serves as a powerful multiplier, enhancing performance, elevating the consumer experience, and equipping our creative teams with the tools that will enable them to tell even better stories more efficiently and effectively.”
