Viacom plans product and engineering team investments for Pluto TV

Viacom on Friday reiterated its $1 billion domestic advertising expectations for Pluto TV, and the company said it will be investing in the AVOD platform to help make that happen.

Viacom CFO Wade Davis said that his company would be making incremental investments in Pluto TV to help grow the company’s product and engineering teams, as well as accelerate the integration process with Viacom as it relates to ad tech and infrastructure. He said it will allow Viacom to sell Pluto TV advertising inventory “more fluidly” across the company’s entire pools of advertisers and marketers.

Davis also said the Pluto TV will be making a range of product announcements over the course of the summer to help grow consumption and engagement.

Viacom said that Pluto TV grew January from 12 million active users in January to 16 million by the end of April. Viacom CEO Bob Bakish said that there will be tens of millions of additional Pluto TV-enabled devices coming online over the next few months.

Viacom said that Pluto TV has added to its portfolio billions of “high-value” ad impressions per month, and most of them are delivered to TV screens. The company said it’s seen strong scatter volume for Pluto TV in March and April, and it plans to incorporate Pluto TV in its upfront presentations this month.

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Pluto TV is also expanding its distribution after being recently added to Comcast’s Xfinity Flex service. Viacom said the Pluto TV is launching on Comcast’s X1 platform soon, and Bakish said there’s another large distributor deal already signed with a few more in the pipeline.

“For Viacom, Pluto TV was always more than a DTC play. We saw it as an opportunity to broaden our partnerships with existing distributors and our early experience has proven just that,” Bakish said.

In addition to domestic distribution deals, Viacom is planning more international expansion for Pluto TV. The service’s current deployments in Switzerland, the U.K. Germany and Austria will be scaled up, and Pluto TV will launch in Latin America in 2019. Viacom is planning more international expansion for Pluto TV in 2020.