Paramount+ Is Going To Make It Easier To Shop With Your Smartphone While Watching Content
Home entertainment has gone far beyond renting a movie or seeing what’s available on your channels on cable. Now we have on-demand streaming services, which to be honest, are great since they allow us to watch what we actually want to watch without needing to wait for its specific slot each day or week.
It’s annoying enough that there are so many of them, but it looks like things are going to get even more annoying, particularly with Paramount+. The company has just announced a partnership with Shopsense AI to launch an “AI-powered retail media platform”. To break that down, Shopsense AI is about to bring shopping into streaming services, as Paramount+ is merely their first partner of a hopeful many.
How Exactly Will This Work?
From what I understand, this new change to the platform will let viewers use a “second screen”, basically a smartphone or tablet (which many have around them when watching shows anyway), to shop for products that are related to the movie or TV show they’re watching, whether those might be clothing, jewelry, figures, or other kinds of merch. It also looks like many of these products may simply just be regular products that viewers of the show are likely to like.
It’s not too certain exactly how the Paramount+ app on your TV will be able to seamlessly link with your phone, as Shopsense AI says you won’t need to bother with “clunky QR codes”. Those clunky QR codes are exactly how I thought things would work. Perhaps it might be integrated into the Paramount+ application on your smartphone. Regardless, I’m personally not a big fan of this, but we’ll see what people think once they begin to use it.
For now, it has only been deployed on CBS Sports and talk shows that run in the daytime, but we all know that’s merely the launchpad, and this in-program purchasing will spread its wings deeper into the catalog.
Paramount+ Isn’t The First To Do This; They Won’t Be The Last
If you use Peacock, you might be scratching your head because such shopping isn’t a new thing to you. Yep, Peacock has had a similar feature, using QR codes in the middle of the show so you can scan with your smartphone and buy something, and these tend to be related to whatever it is you’re viewing at the time.
With Paramount+ joining the party, it would be naive not to expect other streaming services to decide that this is the way forward for their brands. Netflix and Disney+ are already exploring ways to push shopping into their infrastructure.
