"We're ready to move past the noise," the new Paramount Skydance CEO said, as reporters lobbed questions about Trump, 60 Minutes independence, artificial intelligence, The Late Show cancellation and FCC maneuvering.
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| Team Paramount Skydance: Jeff Shell, Gerry Cardinale, David Ellison, George Cheeks and Andy Gordon take questions on Aug. 7 at the company’s office. Photo: Mary Kouw/Paramount |
In his first few minutes as the chief of the newly minted Paramount Skydance, David Ellison took the microphone on Thursday, August 7, taking questions from reporters who’ve followed every dramatic turn of the 13-month journey to close the $8 billion deal to take control of the venerable owner of Paramount Pictures and CBS.
The message from the mogul was urgent: Technology is coming to Hollywood, regardless of whether studios choose to embrace it, so Paramount hopes to take an artist-driven approach to it. That includes machine-learning to help with film and TV show discovery on streaming platforms, as well as an AI influence on “content generation,” but Ellison didn’t go into specifics about what that could mean. In an example cherry-picked for Hollywood, Pixar was cited for revolutionizing the animation world and ushering in an era of 3D animated blockbusters.
The Ellisons were framed as the “first time since Walt Disney” that a family put a sizable amount of money — David’s father Larry Ellison is worth roughly $300 billion — into the major Hollywood studio business to try and kickstart growth. “This is what I’m doing for the next twenty years of my life,” the 42-year-old David Ellison said. “We would not be investing the amount of capital if it was to basically stay stagnant.”
The Oracle heir spoke about his affinity for the film and television business — and said the words that all talent wants to hear, that talent is of utmost importance in a storytelling company — but also signaled that he’s much more willing to experiment with new technology that can “supercharge” Paramount’s IP, which includes SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, Yellowstone and more. (In a nod to the auteur class of Hollywood, the Skydance-era Paramount Pictures unveiled its first original swing, snapping up the James Mangold-directed Timothée Chalamet MotoGP racer movie package High Side shortly after the presentation ended.)
“We need to make more content across the company. We’re going to make more movies, we’re going to make more series, we’re going to invest in the business,” Ellison said. “And we’re going to significantly scale and supercharge the content engines of the company. And while that is absolutely core to the business, I would advocate today that unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete. And that’s one of the big problems that has been facing legacy media. They don’t understand that skill set and how critical that is.”
Ellison tried to distance himself from the $16 million deal that the Shari Redstone-led leadership made with President Trump to settle a 60 Minutes lawsuit. Pressed by reporters about whether Ellison’s Paramount Skydance had a side deal to air public service announcements on the issues Trump cares about, the CEO of the company said that settlement had been made by the prior regime and tried to leave it at that. (The problem is that Trump himself has not left it at that, and has posted on Truth Social about such a deal and talked to reporters about it.) “We’re ready to move past the noise,” Ellison said. “I’m excited to put my head down and do the work and build this business with this remarkable team up here, not sit up there and talk about, basically, how certain things are politicized.”
Ellison added, “Of course we believe in the independence of journalism, we believe in basically being in the trust business, we believe in being in the truth business. But also, I’ve watched others wade in to the political spectrum and, I just want to be transparent, I have no interest in doing that.”
Ellison, flanked by president Jeff Shell, chairman of TV media George Cheeks, RedBird Capital’s Gerry Cardinale and COO Andy Gordon, fielded a series of questions about the deal close on Thursday while at Paramount’s Times Square office complex. Over and over, the buzz word among executives who’d gathered was how they were taking care to be “non-political” in this particular moment. As for CBS News, the exec team zeroed in on describing the broadcast brand as being refocused on the “70 percent” of the country that doesn’t define itself as either far left or far right politically and said it’ll be judged by the journalistic work that it does in the near future.
Ellison was also asked about any deal to buy Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, and replied by saying he took “about 50 meetings” during the Sun Valley mogul conference in July. The Weiss news leaked during that billionaire summer camp event, and has been the subject of speculation due to the $100 million rumored price tag for a Substack newsletter brand, but Ellison would only add a boilerplate line that he couldn’t comment on rumors and speculation.
Another defensive moment occurred when the exec panel was asked about the cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which will end its run in 2026. It was another move made weeks before the new ownership took over, saving this current exec crew from a decision being technically made on their watch (aside from George Cheeks, who was the exec quoted in the Colbert cancellation press release). The question was parried back to reporters, as the flock of journalists were asked to raise their hands if they watched late-night TV at night when it first airs on linear television. Few reporters raised their hands. “Exactly,” Gordon noted. The execs also didn’t respond to a question about how much the Colbert-led show was losing annually, aside from noting that the numbers were “significant, in the tens of millions of dollars.”
Ellison was more open about in-the-weeds questions, including mentioning talks with several tech partners (including Oracle, which Larry Ellison founded) as well as unifying the Paramount tech stack (the backend technology) that powers Paramount+, BET+ and ad-supported PlutoTV, while acknowledging that there’d be cost-cutting made at the company. The exec team also highlighted the importance of Nickelodeon as as asset along with the Tiffany Network, CBS, which still leads broadcast ratings but is being managed as a healthy but declining linear business.
As for layoffs, look for the Thursday, November 6 earnings call for those financial outlook details, the execs said, while also appearing to imply that further pink slip decisions wouldn’t be a quarter-by-quarter occurrence, or, “death-by-a-thousand-cuts” even though $2 billion-plus in synergies — typically things like redundancies in corporate layers, administration, product or tech — had been targeted.
Despite those expected cuts, the goal would be to invest into the growth areas of the business. What those growth areas may be are an outstanding question (the exec panel only dropped hints of how emerging tech could influence content generation) but Ellison has stated in his deal close letter that he hopes to scale up Paramount’s direct-to-consumer business globally. That also includes investing in more content — “the Taylor Sheridan business” was name-checked, in a sign of its prominence, along with an NFL mention — as far as what types of programming may get those dollars. Right now its flagship streamer, Paramount+, has about 77 million subscribers currently, running further behind the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video and closer to HBO Max (and ahead of Peacock).
Shell, for one, signaled that he’s looking forward to finally getting to work implementing the new Skydance plan at Paramount after sitting on the sidelines as the company underwent regulatory review, a drawn out process that, lets just say, certainly didn’t stay “non-political.”
The new Paramount Skydance will trade on the Nasdaq as “PSKY” in its latest incarnation. In an open letter to shareholders on Thursday, Ellison wrote that he wants “to empower our creative partners with technology that will enable them to tell bigger, more compelling stories fueled by human ingenuity.”
Paramount’s new studio chiefs, as well as streaming head Cindy Holland, were not present Thursday, with Dana Goldberg, Josh Greenstein and Don Granger walking the Paramount lot in Hollywood to say hello to employees on their first day, ahead of the next changes ahead. As Ellison added during his Times Square panel chat, “We do have to restructure the business. We will do that in a way that will obviously increase cash flow, but to enable us to invest back in to the business to be able to grow and scale it.”
Original source: The Hollywood Reporter.
More from The Hollywood Reporter:
Can Paramount Pivot to Big Tech? David Ellison Outlines His Silicon Valley Vision
"Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what's coming out of Silicon Valley, you can't compete," the mogul told reporters Thursday. But what does he have in mind?
A quick glance at Hollywood balance sheets, or Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report, underscores just how challenging the current moment facing Hollywood is.
On the Gauge, YouTube and Netflix dominate, with seemingly every other streaming service fighting for scraps, perhaps resigned to an ever-so-slight increase in viewership during a good month. In their earnings reports, YouTube and Netflix are seeing their revenue and cashflow accelerate by double digits (YouTube ad revenue alone closed in on nearly $10 billion last quarter), while most legacy media companies were either flat, down slightly, or perhaps saw single digit growth if they had a good quarter.
Paramount Skydance Sets New Contracts and Compensation Plans for David Ellison and Jeff Shell
Consider Paramount Global. Last week it reported that it had managed to grow revenue year over year … by 1 percent. A challenging market indeed.
Since that earnings report, Paramount now finds itself in new hands: David Ellison, the Skydance founder and son of tech mogul Larry Ellison, and Gerry Cardinale, whose RedBird Capital helped finance the deal.
Speaking to reporters Thursday morning in Paramount’s New York headquarters, it was clear that Ellison, Cardinale and Paramount’s new leadership believe that the success YouTube and Netflix are seeing as traditional media flounders is less about content, and more product.
“Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete,” Ellison said bluntly. “And that has been one of the big problems that’s been facing legacy media, is they don’t actually understand that skill set and how critical that is, and that it is actually a combination of great content working with tech product hand in hand, that is how you actually get this business growing and scaling again, and you need both.”
“The most important thing a modern media company today needs to do is stop keeping its head in the sand,” Cardinale added. “The world’s not going to come to you, you better go out and grab it.”
There are signs that at least some in traditional media are aware of the problem. Disney CEO Bob Iger, for example, has made no secret of his admiration for Netflix’s technical prowess, telling investors on earnings calls that he was focused on building out Disney’s product side of the business.
But Ellison and his team think they can do one better, though the specifics of that plan remain tantalizingly out of reach.
“The way he’s approaching this will be the pace car for how these kind of assets need to be run,” Cardinale said of the plan. “This is not a nice to have, this is a need to have moment in Hollywood. You have a balkanized situation between technology and content, between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the opportunity to actually start to blend that, that’s what needs to happen.”
He went on to shade the late Sumner Redstone, whose motto “content is king” was memorialized by his daughter Shari Redstone in her last earnings call as the owner of Paramount. As many media executives will grudgingly admit, despite the talk of content being king, the last few decades have been about distribution being king, with pay-TV transforming the entire media business. Cardinale believes that technology can shift that balance of power back to creatives.
“Everyone talks about content being king, I would tell you, doing this for 35 years, we’re just now at the point where content has a chance to be king,” Cardinale said.
That starts with a philosophy that embraces change. “We’re not going to be afraid of technology, we’re going to embrace it,” Ellison says, but it is also an acknowledgement of the cold hard reality of modern media. Or as Jeff Shell, Paramount’s new president explained: “We all believe that you can’t cut your way to growth in this business. You have to invest.”
Where that investment flows will be the key thing to watch as Ellison and his team roll out their plan over the coming months. Streaming is a big part of it, and so is gaming, though the executives also said that some “block and tackle” things need to be addressed first, like merging the company’s streaming services onto a single tech stack.
“There is a lot of plumbing,” Shell adds, noting that it may not be as sexy as movies or TV shows, but is in many ways more important to the future of the business.
Ellison was coy about his plans for Paramount+, but suggested that the company would be open to dealmaking.
“When you think about how streaming applications evolve over the next year, they’re not going to look identical to what they do today. We’re going to always look to create long term value in the future, and want to be on the forefront of that. We will be opportunistic,” he said. “So it is critical for the success of the business to be able to scale Paramount+ into a truly direct, global scale streaming product. What I would say is we’re open for business to explore everything.”
And he seemed excited about the prospects of artificial intelligence to turbocharge production while lowering costs.
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From The Hollywood Reporter:
The 20-Year David Ellison Plan, AI Intrigue and Other Questions After Paramount’s Big Media Day
A candid chat about what we saw (and didn't see) from the C-suite of Paramount Skydance during its megadeal presser in Manhattan on Thursday.
On Thursday, a trio of Hollywood Reporter staffers attended a presentation by new Paramount owner David Ellison, who sat alongside his investors from RedBird Capital and new executives at his company’s Manhattan headquarters to lay out his vision for the embattled media firm.
Ellison & Co. had just spent some $8 billion for the 113-year-old studio and have hopes — really, a need — to turn it into a tech company more equipped to handle the realities of the 2020’s. Shortly after the meet-and-greet wrapped, the THR reporters debriefed on what they’d just heard (and didn’t hear) from the incoming ownership.
Steven Zeitchik: So I have to admit, I came into the event feeling like it was just going to be more of the same — find efficiencies, unlock shareholder value, all that MBA snooze lingo — and was pleasantly surprised to actually hear a plan that kinda makes sense: combine the Ellison tech-savvy (and money) with all those iconic Paramount properties.
Alex Weprin: It seems like they have a vision. Whether they can execute, that’s a whole other question. But I came away thinking this isn’t just a pure vanity play where they buy it and they don’t know what they’re going to do with it. They really think technology can change the entertainment industry, even if they were not as forthcoming as they could have been.
SZ: A vision and also advantages no one else has. Like Google-YouTube and Netflix don’t have the library or history Paramount does, and of course most other legacy companies don’t have the tech savvy from their owner. They could argue they now have both in a way no company has before.
AW: That’s true, except if you look at Nielsen Gauge, YouTube is adding share of viewership on TV, and they’re a pure tech company. So you may just not need to be a legacy TV company. But maybe there’s room for an entertainment company to come in and say we can build a tech product too, a kind of pipeline that is consumer friendly and make people watch more of your stuff, whatever it might be, that can compete with YouTube and Netflix, which are a tier above when it comes to sucking up consumers’ time.
SZ: Totally. I felt like that was the real frustration talking to their team yesterday, like we spend all this money to produce Matlock and then we only get a viewer one hour a week while YouTube spends a lot less and they have them five hours a day. Erik, tell me if I’m being too credulous here. Did anything they say convince you?
Erik Hayden: One thing I was struck by is how Ellison said I’m doing this for the next 20 years. Obviously it’s hyperbole, but the exec team also said this is the first family since Walt Disney to put a lot of their own money into a company. They’re framing themselves as an infusion into Hollywood rather than as an extractor. They’re also framing the company as a long-term play. The problem is that David Ellison is now the CEO of a public company and he’s going to have to react to quarterly earnings and the investor class, and is going to be hearing a lot of “are they big enough to compete with Netflix” and all the narratives we hear daily.
SZ: Yeah, and those analysts don’t care about what ol’ Walt did but just about the business. And certainly all these legacy cable companies or even CBS is stuff that doesn’t get them excited. So it’s a little bit like Warner Bros. Discovery where Wall Street could just want cuts and a fire sale. The difference though is these guys may be too rich to care. Like seriously, does the stock price matter to them at that level.
AW: You know, I don’t think David Ellison or even new CEO Jeff Shell needs to hit their bonus numbers the way David Zaslav does.
SZ: I think David Ellison got the bonus that mattered when he turned 18.
AW: It’s actually a meaningful thing; their compensation packages are lower at the outset. The salaries are in line, but their target bonuses are $1.5 million. Which really is below average in the industry. So I really don’t think they have the reason to hit the numbers in a quarter the way other executives do. RedBird wants to see return but Ellison is in a different position.
EH: I wonder if it would work better if they went private.
AW: Given how much ownership they have it probably wouldn’t take that much. Might be something they think about down the line.
SZ: In the meantime let’s not forget they’ll be doing cutting too, which Wall Street always likes. They pretty much said that yesterday. Jeff Shell was asked what he was most excited about and he literally said efficiency. I could almost feel everyone else on the panel balk. It’s like dude, we’re all talking big vision and then he’s like, yeah, I’m going to get that Redstone gristle right outta here.
EH: And the only detail they gave on the cutting was that they wouldn’t do it on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and it won’t be death by 1,000 cuts like we saw with Warner Bros Discovery. It was just, look to the Nov. 6 earnings call for more.
AW: I think there’s going to be a big, big, dramatic reorganization. They’re going to talk about it in November, and then it’s going to happen very quickly after.
SZ: What do we think the company looks like when that’s all done — maybe just a movie studio and then whatever the souped-up Paramount+ is? And CBS, for the time being.
EH: It seems like that’s how it’s going to be. Ellison appears to view it as Paramount Pictures … and everything else.
AW: I guess the only reason I’d push back is that nobody would argue a movie studio is a growth business. Maybe you can add more films to the slate because they’ve released so few films over the last couple of years. But theatrical is not an overall growth business.
EH: Maybe then big IP – Top Gun, Terminator, Star Trek. Wherever it gets monetized.
SZ: And film franchises can still bring in the bucks. I mean they made $1.2 billion just in the last couple years just on Mission: Impossible movies. Split with theaters, of course, but still. And you get the sense Ellison loves getting a Top Gun-type hit cooking. He also really seems to want to fix Paramount+ – which people forget by the way has like 80 million subscribers.
EH: And also had the two most-watched original shows of the year with Taylor Sheridan’s Landman and 1923, with MobLand at No. 4, according to Luminate’s tally.
SZ: The question is the algorithm, can they get it to anything close to Netflix, where they just recommend stuff that keeps you on the platform.
AW: It will be interesting when Cindy Holland talks next week in L.A. on the studio lot about what their plans are. She comes from Netflix and they’re the masters at just keeping people hooked.
SZ: You get the sense Ellison really wants to own it, the distribution. The exec team implied that when shows do better on YouTube than they do on an owned-and-operated platform it’s a loss. It’s really all about keeping it tightly on P+.
AW: They make a lot more money when they’re distributing. It used to be “content is king” but really it’s turning into “distribution is king.”
EH: And they’ve got a decent brand to do that, despite everything. Everyone knows what a Paramount+ show is now – the action, the solid Middle America, Sheridan-esque premium brand. You can build on that.
SZ: Speaking of, well, whatever the opposite is of building, we have to mention CBS News. Like at this point do they just want this whole thing to go away.
EH: I thought it was funny Ellison kept saying we’re staying nonpolitical. I didn’t get the sense he wants to be a media operator.
AW: Like a lot of companies I think they view the news division as more of a pain in the butt.
SZ: Which is what makes Bari Weiss and all The Free Press rumors strange. Does he really covet it?
EH: I thought when he was asked yesterday about The Free Press it was interesting that he didn’t say “oh we really like what they’re doing,” which is what someone may typically say aside from a “we don’t comment on rumors and speculation.” He just said something like “I took 50 meetings at Sun Valley and that was one of them.”
SZ: Yeah that may be a tempest in a teapot. It might be more interesting to look at what he could do with influencers. He wants cheap YouTube-y content, there’s a whole lot of political content right there. DC Draino on one hand, Meidas Touch or Hasan Piker on the other, boom, you’ve got your suck-up-consumer time. Whether you’ve got your good-for-democracy time, I don’t know. But you got your hours.
AW: I wouldn’t be surprised if his news strategy was driven by, you know, more opinionated people. Because the funny thing is they talk a lot about being dedicated to truth but I think in today’s media environment truth is just not that valuable.
SZ: A slogan for late-stage capitalism.
AW: But I mean it’s true. If he’s looking at what he can monetize there are a whole lot of opinion voices on the content creator side.
SZ:. Alright if we’re talking influencers we have to address this other elephant in the room: TikTok. If Larry Ellison buys it and it somehow gets aligned with Paramount it’s a game-changer for the younger Ellison, right? Now they have these crazy algorithms and millions of users and they can really go off.
EH: I just—
SZ: Not feeling it?
EH: I just don’t know that the businesses have anything to do with each other.
SZ: Fair. But that’s where the AI and the personalization comes in. Ellison was talking about how he wants it so that pretty soon – obviously the tech isn’t there yet, but when it is — you can have a conversation with your favorite character. That would be the brass ring for him, wouldn’t it? TikTok with SpongeBob?
AW: I think if they buy TikTok it is a gamechanger. They become a juggernaut that can challenge YouTube and Netflix.
SZ: It has to be, right? No one in history has ever owned so much legacy media and so much social power. Well Rupert did with MySpace but let’s not talk about that.
AW: It really feels like it would change everything.
SZ: And if he doesn’t? Like what’s the ceiling here? Just staying alive?
AW: I think there’s ample room to turn the business around – you do a better job at the movie studio and a better job at the TV studio and a better job at streaming, you could have a Universal-level business.
SZ: And a Disney-level business?
AW: I wouldn’t go that far.
###
From Deadline:
David Ellison, Jeff Shell & Paramount Team Queried On Trump, Tech, Layoffs, Cable, Late Night & More At Debut Press Conference
Arrayed casually on a line of stools on a low stage at Paramount Global’s Times Square headquarters, new leadership of post-merger Paramount greeted a few dozen journalists and opened the floor, immediately bombarded with questions about Donald Trump’s PSAs (fact or fiction?), the CBS ombusdman, Late Night, looming layoffs and the future of linear television as two of its largest rivals are set to split in half.
Chairman-CEO David Ellison skirted political questions but did say the company “will be a fierce defender of talent and always has been.” The merger closed only hours ago, he noted a number of times at the meet-and-greet.
The combined company is looking for at least $2 billion in synergies and that will requires layoffs and restructuring. Shell acknowledged you can’t cut a company into growth and promised departures would come in a slow drip but as quickly as possible, and come hand in hand with significant investments in growing businesses.
Gordon promised the new Paramount will have specific strategy announcements on its quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts on November 6.
There are no plans to split off linear television since CBS is doing well and Par’s cable assets are a smaller percentage of its overall business now than at Comcast or WBD. “Not all linear television is created equal,” said Shell.
Cheeks reiterated that ending The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was a purely financial decision with timing driven by the limitations of the schedule.
Ellison unveiled some initial thoughts and plans this morning in a post on Par’s website after the $8.4 billion merger closed officially this morning.
“Why we’re so excited about this investment that we’re really going to take an owner operator approach to business, you know, between myself and Gerry, we’ll have 70% of the shares, and so we’re really invested in long-term value creation and we’re going o make all of our decisions rooted in that. And from that standpoint, our number one priority is [that] we win with content across all of our verticals, and really be the number one destination for the most talented artists and filmmakers, and journalists and sports rights in the world. We also believe that to win in today’s quick and massively changing landscape, we also need to be the most tech [savv] media company out there. And we’re going to require deep partnerships to be able to achieve that goal,” he Ellison at the NYC gathering.
On tech, the new media mogul emphasized a one big problem he sees is that legacy companies are afraid of it. He, on the other hand, is the son of Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison, and has the opposite view.
“We’re going to make more movies, we’re going to make more series, we’re going invest into the business, and we’re going to really significantly scale and supercharge the content engines. And while that is absolutely core to business, I would advocate today that unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t produce, and that has been one of the big problems with legacy media,” he said.
“They don’t actually understand that skill set and how critical it is and it is actually a combination of great content working with tech product. Hand in hand is how you actually get this business to grow. You need both. One without the other is not enough. And so that’s the thing I think people are missing.”
Other top executives on the Paramount executive roster include Dana Goldberg, Co-Chair of Paramount Pictures and Chair of Paramount Television; Josh Greenstein, Co-Chair of Paramount Pictures and Vice Chair of Platforms; Cindy Holland, Chair of Direct-to-Consumer; Stephanie Kyoko McKinnon, General Counsel and Acting Chief Legal Officer; Jim Sterner, Chief People Officer; and Melissa Zukerman, Chief Communications Officer.
The merged company announced its leadership team across film, TV and streaming yesterday.
From Deadline:
New Paramount Weighing All Streaming Options, CEO David Ellison Says, In Charting A Tech-Forward Path
Paramount CEO David Ellison offered a mantra Thursday that applies to many of its businesses, but especially streaming: “We’re not going to be afraid of technology; we’re going to embrace it.”
He and other top execs emphasized the company’s tech-forward stance throughout a press conference held in New York barely three hours after the close of the companies’ $8.4 billion merger on Thursday.
Ellison said Paramount is “open for business” in streaming. A number of strategic options are on the table, including joint ventures, in the wake of the just-closed $8.4 billion Skydance-Paramount deal. He did not rule out a full merger of subscription service Paramount+ and free, ad-supported Pluto TV after their tech stacks are joined over the next year to 18 months.
“We’re starting from a remarkable place in the streaming business,” he said, citing the strength of programming like Taylor Sheridan’s shows and the NFL. He called streaming “critical for the success of the business” given the free fall of linear cable. Accordingly, he added, “We’re going to invest in the content.”
Ellison and four other senior execs met the media for the first time since July 2024, having kept mum during the long and complicated regulatory process. During that time, a number of press reports have circulated about Paramount talking to Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal and other streaming players about various team-up scenarios. Asked about the state of those discussions, Ellison said, “We have no commitments at this time.”
Paramount+, a reboot of the former CBS All Access that has gone through myriad changes, including the onboarding of Showtime’s formerly separate service, ended the second quarter with 77.7 million subscribers. That was down from 79 million in the January-to-March frame, a sizable number but not in the top echelon of streaming. Pluto TV has traveled a similar trajectory. It pioneered the idea of FAST after launching in 2014 but has in recent years been eclipsed by rivals like Tubi and the Roku Channel.
Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of Skydance financial backer RedBird Capital, returned to Ellison’s point about the primacy of programming. He said the crossroads where traditional media companies find themselves requires a different mindset than the one most companies adopted in the past.
“This is not a ‘nice to have’ – this is a ‘need to have’ moment in Hollywood,” he intoned. “You have a balkanized situation between technology and content, between Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the opportunity here is to actually start to blend that, and that’s what needs to happen.”
It wasn’t clear whether Cardinale’s next comment was an intentional nod to the famous pronouncement of Sumner Redstone, the late architect of the Paramount Global empire, or his daughter, Shari, who presided over the sale to Skydance. If it was, he didn’t cite them by name. “Everyone talks about content being king, right?” Cardinale said. “I would tell you, and I’ve been doing this for 35 years, we’re just now at the moment where content has a chance to be king. But if you don’t re-underwrite the way this content is monetized … you’re not gonna get there.”
To the point about the tech imperative, Paramount President Jeff Shell said a lot of the “plumbing at this company needs to get fixed,” with those improvements enabling the company to excel in streaming. “That’s not as sexy” as some other elements of the takeover, he added, but “very necessary when you run a company of this size.”
Along with data systems and back-end improvements, COO and Chief Strategy Officer Andy Gordon said the user interfaces, which have lagged behind others in the industry, will get a significant overhaul. Paramount+ and Pluto are “our first face to the world,” Gordon said. “We want to make sure that is the best experience for the user as possible.”
Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, is the billionaire chairman of Oracle, said if Hollywood companies have to keep the bar high in terms of execution. “The company currently operates three streaming services with three separate operating systems on multiple clouds, which is a combination of really ineffective and really inefficient,” he said, with BET+ and other AVOD services also under the tent. “Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete.”
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