PlutoTV · Paramount · 2021
The machinery behind free TV
PlutoTV looks simple from the couch — press a button, watch TV. Behind it sits an operation deciding what can play, where, when, on which device, and next to which promo. I owned the design of that machinery.
The two-minute version
- Content Services is the business infrastructure behind PlutoTV — acquisition, licensing, availability windows, geography, scheduling, featured content and studio relationships. Millions of small relationships, all of which have to agree.
- I was in charge of design for the entire Content Services team and worked directly with product and engineering on the internal tools operators use to manage it — making rules visible, locking what shouldn’t be touched, and showing the consequences of a change before it ships.
- Featured-content integrations boosted engagement and reduced licensing breaches, saving Pluto thousands of SLA credits. Because Content Services feeds what viewers see, my work also reached consumer-facing surfaces — promotional placements and PlutoTV Rooms, a watch-party extension with 10,000+ users.
A free TV service is a licensing machine with a remote control attached.
PlutoTV streams hundreds of free, ad-supported channels and a large on-demand library across web, mobile, smart TVs and streaming devices in many countries. Every title on it arrives through a deal with a studio or partner, and every deal comes with rules: when it can stream, in which territories, on which platforms, whether it can be featured, and for how long.
Content Services is the part of the business that turns those rules into what actually shows up on a screen. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong expensively: a movie keeps playing after its license window closes, or a partner’s content isn’t available where the contract promises it will be. Those are licensing problems and SLA misses — and the operations team was spending a lot of time cleaning them up.
Millions of relationships, and most of them are invisible.
Combinatorial rules
Title × territory × device × window × channel × placement. A single scheduling decision can ripple across geography, licensing windows, devices and millions of viewers.
Many hands, one catalog
Acquisitions, programming, scheduling, marketing and partner teams all touch the same content, each with their own view of what matters.
Internal tools, external stakes
The users are internal, but the consequences are contractual. Mistakes surface as partner escalations, not bug reports.
The system had grown faster than the UI
Rules lived in data, spreadsheets and people’s heads. Parts of the system were complicated enough that people were nervous to touch them.
Owning a product area, not a set of screens.
I was in charge of design for the entire Content Services team — the operational side of PlutoTV, while around 40 designers worked on the consumer apps — and worked day-to-day with its product managers and engineers — in planning, in technical discussions, and in the build. My UX engineering background meant I could prototype against real data shapes and talk through feasibility in the same conversation as the design.
What I owned
- Product design for Content Services’ internal tools: content and availability, scheduling-adjacent workflows, campaigns and featured placements
- Information architecture and rules modeling with product and engineering
- Interaction patterns for locked, inherited and conflicting settings
- Consumer-facing assets those tools feed (promotional placements, upsells), plus product design for PlutoTV Rooms
What the wider team owned
- Content Services product management and engineering
- Content operations, programming and partnerships
- Consumer app design (~40 designers across TV, web and mobile)
- Paramount+ marketing and brand
Much of the Content Services work can’t be shown for business and client-privacy reasons, so this case study leans on the one tool I can share and on diagrams of how the system works.
One title, many constraints.
The first job was making the domain legible to ourselves. Every title passes through the same stages, and each stage adds constraints the next one has to respect. At the moment someone presses play, all of them have to agree.
Framing it this way changed the design conversation. Instead of “build a screen for scheduling” and “build a screen for licensing,” the question became: where does each constraint live, who is allowed to change it, and how does the person downstream find out?
Make the rules visible. Protect what shouldn’t move.
Separate what you’re editing from what you’re inheriting.
Campaigns are a good example of the whole system in miniature. A “Paramount+ Upsell” campaign has its own content — billboard slots, badges, sponsor lines — but it also inherits publication settings (regions, territories, dates) and distribution targets from rules set elsewhere. Showing inherited settings as locked, rather than hiding them or letting anyone edit them, meant operators could see the full picture without being able to break a contract by accident.
- Where am I? Upsell campaigns → Primetime billboards → this campaign. Operators work across dozens of these.
- Status and audience up front: published, and whether it’s visible to the office only for review.
- Locked publication settings. Regions, territories and dates come from rights and scheduling rules — visible, not editable here.
- Distribution targets. 60 of 77 platforms enabled. Each toggle is a device or partner surface with its own rights.
- Placement rules in the UI: minimum 5, maximum 6 billboards, each with a badge and sponsor line.
- Replace, don’t rebuild. Swapping a title keeps the slot, badge and sponsor — the most common edit is also the safest.
Show the consumer result next to the configuration.
The people setting up campaigns and featured content aren’t looking at the app while they do it. So the tools and the consumer surfaces were designed together: every field in the campaign maps to something a viewer sees — a billboard, a badge color, a sponsor line, a Paramount+ offer — on a specific set of devices.
TV: an upsell billboard driven by a campaign.
In-player prompt that stays out of the way of the content.
Mobile: the same campaign as a dismissible modal flow.
Mobile home placements for Paramount+ content.
Design for the edit that happens a thousand times, not the setup that happens once.
Most operator time isn’t spent creating things — it’s spent swapping a title, extending a window, or fixing a placement that conflicts with a rights change. So the frequent edits got the most care: replace a title in place without rebuilding the slot, placement rules (min/max) stated right where you work, and confirmations that say exactly what changed.
In the room where the data model gets decided.
The most useful design work on Content Services happened before anything was drawn: sitting with engineers while they modeled how rights, schedules and placements relate, and pushing for the UI’s needs — “how does someone know this is inherited?”, “what happens to live campaigns when a territory is removed?” — to be answered in the data model instead of patched in the front end.
Because I could build, prototypes could use realistic data shapes rather than lorem ipsum, which surfaced edge cases (77 distribution targets, anyone?) early enough to matter.
PlutoTV Rooms: a watch party, shipped fast.
During lockdown, every streaming platform rushed to build “watch party” features. As a quick step toward native integration, we built PlutoTV Rooms — a Chrome extension that let viewers create a room, invite up to ten friends, and watch live TV together with video and chat. I was the product designer, working with a product owner and three developers to design, build and ship it quickly. It reached 10,000+ users on the Chrome Web Store.
In a room: live TV plus friends on video.
Chat mode for when video is too much.
What changed.
I was design lead and development partner on the infrastructure update of PlutoTV’s backend administration platform. The featured-content integrations boosted engagement and reduced licensing breaches, saving Pluto thousands of SLA credits. Rules that had lived in people’s heads became visible in the tools, and the most common edits became the safest ones.
- Linear channels across Pluto TV’s global footprint
- 800+
- Countries, each with its own rights and availability rules
- 35+
- On-demand titles in a rotating library
- 43,000+
- Monthly active users
- ~80M
Scale figures are recent public industry numbers for Pluto TV, included to show the size of the system Content Services supports — not metrics from my time there.
What this project says about how I work.
Systems thinking
Modeling a combinatorial rights domain before designing the tools on top of it.
Internal tools, taken seriously
Designing for operators whose mistakes become contract problems.
Product ownership
Owning a product area end to end, alongside product and engineering.
Range
From licensing infrastructure to a consumer watch-party extension in the same year.