Paramount+ redesign leans into short-video clips to boost daily engagement

Paramount+ is recasting its app around the way people already use their phones: quick swipes, short clips and constant refreshes. The redesigned version, already available to Apple iPhone users in the United States, puts sports highlights, CBS News segments, UFC clips and trailers for movies and shows at the center of the experience, a move aimed at getting viewers to open the app several times a day instead of only when a new series drops.

The strategy goes beyond packaging. Paramount wants the app to feel active between live broadcasts, with potential features such as real-time statistics during UFC Fight Night matchups and UFC Numbered Events. Executives have also discussed working with digital influencers and testing micro dramas, minute-long stories that could be assembled into longer arcs. That approach reflects a hard truth for streaming: for younger viewers, discovery increasingly happens in the same endlessly scrolling rhythm that has made TikTok and Instagram dominant.

Inside Paramount, the short-form push had already been moving under the name Project Eagle. In January, Dan Reich told colleagues the company was trying to get “a million clips” into the short-form user experience as quickly as possible, with the Applied Machine Learning Group already supplying clips or nearly ready to do so. The new feed suggests that Paramount is trying to turn a deep library of sports, news and entertainment into a more compulsive daily destination, not just a catalog of on-demand programming.

The challenge is enormous. In the first quarter of 2026, Paramount accounted for just 2% of global streaming on apps, while YouTube had 59 times as many users as Paramount+. That gap underscores how far Paramount still has to go if it wants to compete for mobile attention against platforms built around short-form habits from the start. If Warner Bros. Discovery’s planned acquisition proceeds and HBO Max is combined with Paramount+, the merged service would become the fourth-largest streaming app.

Paramount’s app overhaul is part of a broader redesign of Paramount+ and Pluto TV that the company has described to advertisers. It also lands as rivals chase the same screen time in different ways: Netflix is investing in video podcasts with personalities including Pete Davidson, Michael Irvin and Brian Williams, while Amazon Prime Video has a deal with Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, for Beast Games. With Larry Ellison connected to both Paramount and TikTok U.S. through Oracle, and no deal in place between the companies, the message from Hollywood is clear: the fight for streaming is now being waged on the smallest screens, one swipe at a time.