Viacom plans investments in Pluto TV's products and engineering team



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Viacom reaffirmed Friday its national advertising expectations for Pluto TV, amounting to $ 1 billion, and announced that it would invest in the AVOD platform to achieve it.

Viacom's Chief Financial Officer, Wade Davis, said his company would make additional investments in Pluto TV to help develop its product and engineering teams, as well as to accelerate the process of integrating with Viacom with respect to advertising technologies and infrastructure. He added that this would allow Viacom to sell Pluto TV's advertising inventory "more fluidly" to all of the company's advertisers and marketing pools.

Davis also said that Pluto TV will be doing a series of product announcements over the summer to help increase consumption and commitment.

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Viacom said that Pluto TV has grown from 12 million active users in January to 16 million by the end of April. Bob Bakish, CEO of Viacom, said that tens of millions of other devices compatible with Pluto TV would be online in the coming months.

Viacom said Pluto TV added billions of "high value" advertising impressions to its portfolio each month, most of which were broadcast on television screens. The company said Pluto TV had recorded a significant broadcast volume in March and April and was considering integrating Pluto TV with its initial presentations this month.

RELATED: Viacom says Pluto TV deal represents opportunity to generate $ 1 billion in advertising revenue

Pluto TV is also expanding its distribution after being recently added to Comcast's Xfinity Flex service. Viacom announced that the Pluto TV channel would soon be launched on Comcast's X1 platform, and Bakish said another major distribution contract had already been signed and several more were in preparation.

"For Viacom, Pluto TV has always been more than a DTC game. We saw an opportunity to expand our partnerships with existing distributors and our first experience proved it, "said Bakish.

In addition to national distribution agreements, Viacom is considering a more international expansion of Pluto TV. Current deployments of the service in Switzerland, the UK, Germany and Austria will be intensified, and Pluto TV will be launched in Latin America in 2019. Viacom plans to expand Pluto TV's international expansion in 2020.

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