DENVER – The underlying technology for subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms and free ad-supported television (FAST) platforms is starting to look very similar, according to Paramount Streaming CTO Vibol Hou, which is why the company is strategizing to improve collaboration between its Pluto TV (a FAST) and Paramount+ (an SVOD).
At this year’s StreamTV event Hou stressed the importance of knowledge sharing across those platforms’ engineering teams and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in eliminating existing silos across the Paramount Streaming division.
Paramount has plans to expand its markets and viewership overseas for both platforms. Hou explained that usually, these expansion efforts would call for hiring more engineers to each team, but the market “is not as strong right now when it comes to advertising and other things, making hiring a bit of a challenge.”
Thus, collaboration between the Paramount+ and Pluto TV engineering teams will be key.
When Pluto TV was conceived nine years ago, there were limited technological options to power linear FAST services, Hou said. However, with the industry’s pace of innovation the foundational technologies driving today’s FAST services have become "quite similar" to those behind SVOD platforms, including their streaming systems, content delivery networks (CDNs) and ad insertion systems.
But Paramount has maintained separate technology stacks for Paramount+ and Pluto TV, as the products are “growing so fast that it necessitates that we run them in a dual track.”
The Streaming division is an amalgamation of over 2,000 engineer teams across Paramount+, Pluto TV and Viacom Networks, all working separately behind various silos and business lines – despite “doing similar things,” Hou said, “so there’s a lot of opportunity for us to converge those architectures.”
He emphasized the potential for “inner sourcing” among the different platforms’ engineer teams.
"There's a lot that can be learned between the groups. We can leverage the strengths of each product for the other," he said. “A lot of our modern technology is built on top of open source, for example when your company uses the cloud, what underpins the compute units tend[s] to be an open-source piece of software called Linux. So that kind of accessibility to information is something that we're building internally.”
This will come into play as Paramount works to improve the personalized experience – “putting the right things in front of the right viewers at the right times,” as Hou put it – across all its platforms. For example, Paramount+ already utilizes personalization systems whereas Pluto TV does not, which Hou pointed to as one area where cross-platform synergy could pay off.
Hou indicated that Paramount's Streaming division will also harness AI advancements to elevate software development and communication across teams, particularly by using AI as a writing tool.
“As engineers, we write code but when it comes to explaining what we’ve done there’s a lot of work we need to do to improve on that,” Hou said. “And when we think about knowledge sharing across the enterprise, telling each other stories about what we’re doing, what we’ve built, that’s another place where these new AI technologies can help us summarize and create narrative around what we’ve done."