Paramount+ is prepping a move into short-form video and potentially user-generated content, according to internal presentations and emails reviewed by Business Insider. It’s a product shift aimed squarely at fixing Paramount+’s biggest structural problem: people don’t open the app often enough.
The internal materials describe an initiative called Project Eagle, with leadership pushing teams to stand up a short-form user experience capable of handling more than a million clips as quickly as possible. The focus is mobile. The assumption is personalization. The underlying bet is frequency.
Paramount didn’t comment publicly, but the intent is clear. Paramount+ wants to become something users check, not just something they watch.
Paramount’s Actual Problem Isn’t Content Volume
Paramount doesn’t lack IP. It lacks habit.
Subscribers come for Yellowstone spinoffs, Star Trek, live sports, or kids programming, then they leave. They don’t come back tomorrow just to see what’s new. That’s deadly in a world where TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram get dozens of daily opens without asking for a 45-minute commitment.
Internal emails reviewed by Business Insider show product leaders explicitly talking about pressure to deliver a personalized clip feed once the short-form inventory is loaded. That tells you this isn’t about trailers. It’s about recreating the scroll.
Short-form solves one thing really well: it lowers the cost of opening the app. No title selection. No time math. No friction. You open, you swipe, the app does the rest.
That’s the game Paramount is trying to enter.
Why User-Generated Content Is Even on the Table
The most revealing detail in the internal presentations is the explicit mention of UGC. Paramount hasn’t built anything close to that historically, and for good reason. Moderation, rights, brand safety, and incentives are a nightmare.
But UGC solves two problems Paramount cares about right now.
First, it’s cheap. Second, it scales attention without requiring hits.
One source told Business Insider that UGC could “bring eyes to Paramount.” That’s not subtle language. That’s an admission that the service needs top-of-funnel gravity, not just premium programming at the bottom.
The risk is obvious. The moment Paramount opens the door to creator content, it’s no longer just a studio-driven streaming service. It’s a hybrid feed product competing with companies that have spent a decade optimizing creator incentives, recommendation systems, and safety tooling.
That’s a steep hill. Paramount knows it. The fact that they’re still exploring it tells you how badly they want daily opens.
This Is Ellison’s Strategy Turning Into Product
David Ellison has talked nonstop about running Paramount like a tech company. Short-form is where that talk finally becomes visible.
This push lines up neatly with broader industry moves. Netflix is redesigning its mobile app around short-form discovery. Disney is experimenting with AI-assisted short-form inside Disney+. Everyone sees the same data. Long-form drives revenue. Short-form drives habit.
What’s different for Paramount is necessity. Netflix already owns nights and weekends. Disney owns families. Paramount owns… moments. And moments don’t compound unless you manufacture reasons to come back tomorrow.
That’s what Project Eagle is trying to do.
The Risk Paramount Can’t Avoid
Short-form feeds don’t work halfway.
If the clips feel like marketing, users bounce. If personalization is weak, users churn. If UGC feels off-brand, execs panic and pull back. The internal emails suggest teams already feel pressure around personalization, which is where most of these efforts stall.
There’s also a quiet tension here. Paramount makes money when people watch long-form shows and live sports. A great short-form feed can cannibalize attention as easily as it feeds it. The product has to route users somewhere valuable, not trap them in endless scrolling with no payoff.
That’s execution risk, not strategy risk. But it’s real.
The Streaming Wars Take
The economics of streaming now demand frequency, not just engagement depth.
Short-form is the cheapest way to train daily behavior inside a subscription product. It creates more data, more touchpoints, and more chances to surface something that actually makes money. Without it, Paramount+ stays episodic in a world that’s become continuous.
The danger is thinking the feed itself is the win. It isn’t. The win is using short-form to make long-form unavoidable. That’s the bar. Anything less is just noise dressed up as strategy.
