What does the role of VP, Partner Management & Business Development – Streaming entail?
At its core, the role is about growth through partnerships. I’m responsible for identifying, negotiating and managing strategic relationships that expand where and how audiences can access Paramount+ and 10 Streaming. That includes everything from connected TVs and telco bundles to venues, airlines and emerging platforms. It’s a mix of commercial strategy, deal-making, and long-term relationship management — always with a focus on delivering value for both the partner and our viewers & subscribers.

Your role puts Paramount+ on screens well beyond the living room (pubs, clubs and even planes!). What’s the first thing you have to think about before any partnership can even get off the ground?
The very first question we always ask is: does this environment make sense for our content and our brand and will it deliver an audience or subscriber outcome for us? Before commercial terms or technology assessments, we need to understand the context — how people are watching, how long they’re watching for, is there a demand for our content through this platform/place and what kind of experience we can realistically deliver.

If the viewer experience isn’t right or if we aren’t going to deliver an outcome for our desired audience or subscribers, the partnership won’t be either.

When you’re negotiating a venue or platform partnership, what matters more: scale, visibility, or how the product is experienced?
This is a tough one – all are extremely important for us, however, at the end of the day, experience comes first. Scale and visibility are absolutely very important, but they only matter if the product shows up and is delivered in a way that feels premium, intuitive and aligned with our brand.

We are in the business of delivering audiences at scale, however, we also need to make sure that the experience for users and subscribers is very strong, having them remain subscribers and viewers and watch our content on a regular and re-occurring basis.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about “getting Paramount+ on a screen” — and what’s actually involved behind the scenes?
People often assume it’s just a flick of a switch. In reality, it’s a complex combination of technology integration, content rights management, commercial structures, product design, on platform content curation, compliance and ongoing operational support.

Every screen and platform is different, every platform has its own constraints, and getting it right requires close collaboration across multiple teams on both sides. Our tech and product teams work tirelessly to not only develop our apps to be purpose built for many platforms, but continue to manage and support them on a daily basis to ensure they continue to operate at a high level for our subscribers and users.

The LG Electronics partnership was a first of its kind in Australia. At what point did you realise this deal was genuinely something new?
We pitched the concept to LG in mid 2024 – at this time it was quite a unique proposal, one that LG locally had not considered before. It was at this time we knew it was genuinely something new and took a lot of negotiating with their local and head office team in South Korea to convince them this was an opportunity worth pursuing.

What problem was the LG integration solving for viewers that hadn’t been solved before?
We had been monitoring data closely that illustrated a lot of Australians were either no longer plugging in their terrestrial aerial when buying a new TV, or were shifting the consumption of content from traditional broadcast viewing to digital viewing (ie to 10Streaming, Paramount+, Netflix etc).

We needed to firstly ensure that any viewer that did not plug in their aerial still had a way to consume 10 linear content (now available through LG Channels) and second, that viewers who only wanted to watch content via digital pathways/IP, had a way to watch 10 linear content on their LG tv’s beyond just the 10Streaming App.

We wanted to bring our 10 linear content to viewers however and wherever they wanted to watch it, rather than relying on them plugging in an aerial to watch 10, or having to navigate into the 10Streaming App to watch our content.

What was the moment you knew: this is going to work?
The elements of this partnership that carried the most risks were whether or not we could technically deliver our feeds into LG channels in a way that we were comfortable with and that would allow us to commercialise the feeds effectively.

After many months of tech and product discovery work and development, we landed on a path forward that we were comfortable with which was great. It was at this point we felt this is going to work.

We are now a few months post launch of our feeds into LG Channels and are seeing some strong MoM growth which again is validating our thoughts and strategy.

Bringing Paramount+ onto Qantas flights takes streaming to 30,000 feet. What made that partnership fundamentally different from working with venues or connected TVs?
Delivering our Paramount+ content onto the QANTAS fleet is an extremely unique content delivery and distribution partnership from our standard partnerships. Firstly, our content team do a brilliant job to ensure we have the content rights required to allow us to deliver Paramount+ content to passengers on board.

Then our content operations team are responsible for working with QANTAS to deliver the content to their fleet – this delivery pathway is quite unique! Our content and marketing teams then work closely to pick what content we would like on the fleet for each month.

The teams are designing for an audience 30,000 feet in the air, that may be time bound on a short flight, or a long haul 14 hour flight, so the viewing behaviour is quite different to someone consuming Paramount+ content at home.

How do partnerships like these change the way audiences discover Paramount+?
This is a completely unique content sampling opportunity for QANTAS passengers and a great way for audiences to discover the best of our Paramount+ content. We know that passengers can be on a flight for anywhere between 1 hour to 14 hours, so this is a great opportunity for us to put Paramount+ content in-front of passengers to sample, hopefully enjoy and then look to either continue watching or subscribe to Paramount+ when they get home.

Partnerships often look seamless once they’re live. What’s a behind-the-scenes challenge people would be surprised to learn goes into making them work?
I would say the alignment and collaboration of many teams across the business is the key element to any successful partnership. Getting legal, technical, commercial, marketing, product teams and more…. all working together is critical. The real work is making sure everyone is working towards achieving the same outcome.