Paramount Global (NASDAQ:PARA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

What is happening with Pluto inside of that without the disclosure anymore? Just curious if there’s anything sort of in terms of Pluto year-over-year that you could help us kind of within those numbers, it would be really helpful to understand. Thanks.

Bob Bakish: Yes. Sure, Rich. Let me take the sports part and Naveen will add on the Pluto side. So a couple of things on sports, really embedded in your question. One, on the announcements over the weekend. Look, we view that as a very additive development for the Big Ten and Paramount in particular, meaning our Big Ten deal looks even better today than when we did it. In terms of specific impact, there will be no change in the fees that we pay or the volume of the games that we get for CBS and Paramount+. But the expansion of the Big Ten clearly enhances the quality of games, the portfolio, if you will, that we have to pick from and that we carry. So essentially, it increases the quality of our deal. And I’d add that we very much look forward to beginning our partnership with Big Ten in the fall.

And frankly, given everything else going on, timing couldn’t be better. So that’s part one. Part two is sports is, as you know, integral to our strategy. It’s really a component of both CBS and Paramount+ from a content offering. We like that. We find sports working very well for us, driving distribution, attracting viewers and subscribers, enabling strong monetization in the ad market, providing powerful promotion and schedule lead-ins, etcetera. And we are in a great place because that works. And our schedule is essentially stable. Our deals are all locked through the end of the decade. So, we are not in a place where we need to do anything. And if you look at what we have, we have broad and top-tier quality sports. We don’t need or frankly want to do anything incremental.

Sports, intentionally, as I have said, are part of the equation. And we do view sports and entertainment as a synergistic mix, both in streaming and on linear. And we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we connect sports viewers with other types of content, including our original slate to maximize the ROI for both. So, for us, the marketplace is what it is, but the answer is not more sports. We are in a great place from a mix standpoint. Instead, it’s about continuing to focus on maximizing the impact of these highly valuable rights that we already have. And again, we have stability. We are locked through the end of the decade. Naveen, on Pluto?

Naveen Chopra: Yes. Thanks. So Rich, as you know, we delivered very strong overall digital advertising revenue growth in the quarter. And that was a combination of Paramount+ and Pluto. So, Pluto is absolutely a key ingredient to driving that growth. And by the way, we expect that growth rate to accelerate next quarter. And it’s really all about driving engagement on both of those platforms that allows us to do that, particularly in a world where, as we talked about, we see an opportunity to bring a whole new class of advertisers onto our digital advertising platforms. There has been a lot of conversation about sort of the cannibalization of television advertising by other forms of digital. We think that’s not the right way to look at this.

We are very bullish about the volume of engagement that we are creating and what that means in terms of the digital advertising opportunity that exists in the future. And that will be enabled by both Paramount+ and Pluto. We sell them together to our advertising clients and that gives us a lot of opportunity to sell to both large and small clients. So, Pluto is performing well, and we are very excited to have it as part of our portfolio.