Pluto TV has dropped to about 75 million monthly active users, Skydance told shareholders on Monday — down from 89.6 million in 2025, a loss of 14.6 million users, or roughly one in six.

The disclosure came in Skydance's third-quarter earnings report and lands one month after CEO David Ellison merged Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal built on the ambition of competing with Netflix and Disney in streaming.

What do the numbers show?

The trajectory, drawn from company announcements and internal documents viewed by Business Insider:

• 2023: 80 million monthly active users, announced in May 2023 as a "milestone"
• 2024: 84.2 million, per an internal slide deck
• 2025: 89.6 million, per the same deck
• 2026: 75 million, announced in November

At an April town hall, Paramount streaming finance chief Elizabeth Wright told employees Pluto TV had added 5.4 million users in 2025, implying the 2024 base of 84.2 million. The slides did not specify whether the figures were fiscal-year averages or year-end totals.

What changed at the platform?

Two shifts preceded the decline. The first is technical: Paramount spent months merging the tech platforms of Paramount+ and Pluto TV in a process known internally as convergence. That first phase is now "largely completed," Skydance's CEOs told shareholders Monday, with Pluto running on the same tech stack as Paramount+ across all major streaming platforms.

The second is cosmetic. In September, Pluto refreshed its interface to put on-demand content front and center, displacing its signature always-on live channels. Skydance's shareholder letter said the redesign and improved personalization are "already improving the user experience."

Two Paramount streaming employees said they believed the layout change could have contributed to the drop in monthly active users.

The company frames the tech merger as strategic, not cosmetic. Consolidating Pluto and Paramount+ onto one platform "lowers our cost to operate, speeds up product development, and gives us shared personalization and monetization capabilities across our free and subscription offerings," Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz wrote in their shareholder letter.

How are Pluto's rivals doing?

Pluto TV launched in 2014, roughly alongside Tubi, and Viacom bought it in 2019 — years before the mergers that produced today's Skydance. It was an early entrant in free ad-supported streaming TV, or FAST. Its rivals are now pulling away.

Tubi, owned by Fox, has grown from 74 million monthly active users in September 2023 to 110 million as of August. Its share of US TV viewing has nearly doubled, from 1% in February 2023 to 1.9% in August, per Nielsen.

The Roku Channel climbed from a 1.1% share of US TV viewing in May 2023 to 2.9% in August — fifth among all streamers, behind only YouTube, Netflix, Disney's streamers and Amazon's Prime Video. Fox said Friday, after agreeing to buy Roku, that the company reaches over 100 million households across its platforms.

Pluto TV first appeared on Nielsen's monthly streaming charts in July 2022 with 0.8% of US TV viewing. Its individual share peaked at 1% in February 2025, after which Nielsen began reporting it together with Paramount+. Paramount's combined streaming share stood at 2.3% in August — the same level as March 2025.

The wider market context is unforgiving. YouTube now commands 15.8% of US TV viewing as of August, up from 5.7% in May 2021. Netflix, its closest rival, holds 7.7%.

The user decline presents Ellison with a growth problem at the free tier just as he attempts to integrate Warner Bros. Discovery and build a combined streaming business credible against Netflix and Disney.