With Paramount Global officially under his control, David Ellison faces a difficult task: making good on his vision of turning the struggling media conglomerate into a tech-forward company that, in his own words, blends the “creative heart of Hollywood” with the “innovative spirit of Silicon Valley.”
Though details around that strategy remain sparse, Ellison said in an open letter after taking over last month that Paramount would use tools such as virtual production stages and artificial intelligence to boost content creation. Paramount will also partner with father Larry Ellison’s Oracle to move Paramount+, Pluto TV and BET+ to a common backend infrastructure next year.
Additionally, Paramount is tapping into the technical expertise of Oracle’s former CEO and current executive vice board chair Saftra Catz and Scale AI chief financial officer Dennis Cinelli, who will both serve as board members, and former Meta and Google executive Dane Glasgow, who will oversee the company’s product strategy and vision going forward across digital platforms, immersive storytelling, advertising and AI-powered capabilities.
The emphasis on technology comes as Ellison tries to kickstart a media company that’s been left rudderless after years of mergers and planned takeovers. It’s also well behind the larger players in the game, with Paramount’s 77.7 million streaming subscribers far short of Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. At the same time, profits in its linear TV business are declining rapidly as audiences cut the cord in favor of streaming and social media.
Paramount isn’t the first company who’s tried to reinvent itself using technology, and history has shown these transformations have varying degrees of success — from the massive digital growth of Netflix and the New York Times to the collapse of Blockbuster after starting the transition too late. But it’s hard to bet against the financial firepower of the Ellison family, who are also circling The Free Press and could potentially add TikTok and Warner Bros. Discovery to their roster in what would be a massive expansion of their control over media and technology.
David Ellison himself has acknowledged the transformation won’t be easy, but insists that, combined with ramping up content investment, it’s key to Paramount’s future success.
“Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete. One of the big problems facing legacy media is they don’t actually understand that skill set and how critical that is,” Ellison told reporters in August. “A combination of great content working with tech products hand-in-hand is how you actually get this business growing and scaling again.”
Representatives for Paramount and Oracle did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment on this story.
Ellison’s uphill battle
While there are some technical benefits Paramount can put into place, it’s still unclear what the grander vision of being a tech-forward company looks like.
Experts told TheWrap that Paramount’s tech transformation could lead to benefits like better ad targeting, more personalized recommendations, more flexibility and speed in decision-making and cost savings. But former MTV and BET digital executive Andrew Rosen noted those wins seem “increasingly marginal and tactical” without having more details about the company’s broader vision.
Others were more skeptical about the long-term benefits, particularly surrounding streaming subscriber growth and engagement.
“I don’t see a change in the consumer-facing part of the technology that is likely to gain them a meaningfully accelerated trajectory on subs or usage. I just don’t see a change to the sign-up flow, marketing tech or recommendation engine that wildly changes where they’re headed,” former CBS Interactive CEO Marc DeBevoise told TheWrap. “But there is value in that new ownership is likely to be more committed and aggressive and do more experimental things to push for faster growth. So, it’s more of a mindset shift than a specific technology that comes out of the box from Oracle.”
Howard Homonoff, a strategic advisor to media and tech companies and managing director of Homonoff Media Group, told TheWrap that he’s not convinced Paramount can beat Netflix, Amazon and Google at tech, or that it’s even Paramount+’s biggest issue.
“It’s a service that, like a number of others, have nowhere near the scale of the biggest competitors in the streaming space,” Homonoff said. “They have a much more global challenge here, which is what’s the place of an independent or partnered Paramount+ in the streaming world?”
Streaming media analyst Dan Rayburn added that moving Paramount+, Pluto and BET+ to the same infrastructure — one of the early priorities for the company — is much easier said than done.
“When you’re acquiring companies and merging different services into the same umbrella, there are places in that video stack where you can say, ‘Hey, we could standardize here.’ But there’s other places where you can’t,” Rayburn told TheWrap. “So it’s easy for executives to say, ‘We’ll just merge everything in the backend,’ or, ‘We’ll default to the same infrastructure,’ but that’s just not reality.”
A studio in the cloud
Ellison has said he intends to scale Oracle’s so-called “Studio in the Cloud” model, an online system which was previously used on production of Skydance Animation and Netflix’s animated musical film “Spellbound,” across all of Paramount’s production workflows.
Studio in the Cloud allows Skydance Animation’s teams across Los Angeles, Madrid and Stamford, Conn., to collaborate, share content and give each other feedback as if they were all in the same room together. It also gives the studio more flexibility to react to last-minute creative changes by scaling its compute, storage and workstations up or down based on the needs of a project, as opposed to the limits of physical data centers and hardware.
“The qualitative gains that we get is the ability to get more content up on the screen for notes in dailies every day. The more notes I get back, the more content I can iterate on, the faster I can get to a bigger decision or even to delivery,” Greg Brentin, Skydance Animation vice president of technology, said during Oracle’s 2024 CloudWorld conference. “And quantitatively, if I need more horsepower because I have a sequence that is really challenging, a lot of foliage, a lot of characters, a heavy environment that’s taking 14 to 20 hours per frame to create, I need more to get it done to hit those creative targets.”
At the time, Brentin said Skydance’s goal was to become the first studio to shift its technology resources entirely away from physical workstations, data centers and storage systems to the cloud by the end of 2025. But it remains to be seen just how easy that transition will be for a legacy media player like Paramount, whose mindset and culture is very different from a tech behemoth like Oracle or even an upstart like Skydance.
“The cultural differences are going to be significant and not simple to get through,” Enderle Group President Rob Enderle told TheWrap. “Getting through the integration part of this merger is going to be extremely painful. [Paramount and Oracle] are two very large-scale entities that are very set in their ways and very different.”
He believes both Glasgow and Oracle will focus heavily on infusing AI to cut costs, improve personalization and content discovery and create smarter, more effective and more lucrative advertising. While AI’s impact on content creation has understandably sparked fears in Hollywood about potential job losses, Ellison has argued it would be used as a tool to help creatives, likening it to Pixar transitioning its staff from pencils and paper to computer animation.
“We’re in another one of those times where you’re going to see that level shift, but we’re always going to do it through the lens of supporting our talent and enabling them to make things that they’ve never created before,” he said at the August presser.
Enderle added Glasgow will create a “stronger B2B culture,” but expects it to clash with Paramount.
“On the positive side, this is likely the right skill set to move Paramount forward,” Enderle said. “On the downside, Paramount will need to change dramatically and organizations like this resist change very effectively.”
Oracle and the Ellison family’s ambitions
While Paramount benefits from Oracle’s technical expertise as it looks to build a next-generation media company, the software giant gets a hefty asset it can use as a test case as it looks to compete for customers and revenue with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
During Oracle’s latest quarterly earnings, Oracle’s Catz told Wall Street its cloud infrastructure revenue will grow 77% to $18 billion in its 2026 fiscal year and increase to $32 billion in fiscal 2027, $73 billion in fiscal 2028, $114 billion in fiscal year 2029 and $144 billion in fiscal year 2030. The majority of that is included in a backlog of about $455 billion in outstanding contract revenue it expects to collect.
“We can give you a private version of the Oracle Cloud with every security feature, every function, everything we do for $6 million,” Larry Ellison said on the company’s investor call earlier this month. “I think the cost for the other hyperscalers is more than 100 times that.”
Beyond the technical support, Larry Ellison appears poised to bring even more assets into the Paramount universe. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump said Larry Ellison, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell are among those who would be involved as investors to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. under a proposed deal with China. Then there’s the reported Paramount bid being prepared for Warner Bros. Discovery, which will be backed by the Ellison family.
“I don’t think this is, ‘Hey, son, here’s your toys. Good luck.’ They’re much more serious people than that. When Larry decides he’s going to enter catamaran racing, he builds the world-cup winning Team USA,” DeBevoise said. “He’s saying, ‘All right, I’ll put down some real money to see you do it on a big scale. And if that works, let’s see if we can make it a way to advance Oracle’s broader ambitions long-term.’ Ultimately, they have to keep iterating.”
When asked at the August presser about how an Oracle acquisition of TikTok would impact Paramount, David Ellison declined to comment. But he emphasized that Paramount’s new leadership would be more focused on the next three to five years rather than the next three months and “open for business to explore everything” to scale the company globally.
“When you think about how streaming applications evolve over the next year, they’re not going to look identical to what they do today,” he said. “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.”
