Paramount CTO Phil Wiser to Depart After Seven Years of Leadership

Paramount Chief Technology Officer Phil Wiser is leaving the company after seven years, the executive announced to employees on Friday. “Writing this and sharing this news is harder than I expected,” Wiser stated in a farewell memo obtained by TheWrap.

Wiser will exit at the end of May as part of a planned transition. In his memo, he shared plans to return to his Silicon Valley roots, with Business Insider reporting he is exploring opportunities in tech startups.

“Phil has played a meaningful role in shaping our technology strategy during his time here,” said Dane Glasgow, Paramount Chief Product Officer, in an email to staff following Wiser’s announcement.

Wiser joined Paramount in 2018 after leading technology initiatives at Hearst and Sony. His tenure included shepherding the company through the Viacom-CBS merger, the rebranding of Paramount+, the Paramount-Skydance merger, and the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The leadership change aligns with Paramount CEO David Ellison’s tech-forward strategy, which emphasizes advancing technology and data capabilities to enhance the company’s competitiveness in streaming.

Rather than appointing a direct replacement, Wiser’s responsibilities will be distributed among several executives:

• Laksh Nathan, EVP and Chief Information Officer;
• Jim Harrison, EVP of Infrastructure and Media Technology;
• Frank Governale, SVP of Production Technology and Operations;
• Carlo Joseph, promoted to Chief Information Security Officer.

These executives will report to Glasgow.

Wiser’s Full Farewell Memo

To my Paramount TECH team,

Writing this and sharing this news is harder than I expected. After seven-plus years together, I have decided to leave Paramount. But before I do, what I most want to say — the only thing that really matters — is thank you.

Thank you for showing up, every single day, through conditions that would have broken lesser teams. Thank you for:

• The late nights and the early mornings;
• The problems you solved that no one ever saw, and the ones you fixed that kept the whole thing running and got none of the credit;
• Being relentlessly focused on the complete technology and service experience for our internal and external customers;
• Every integration meeting, every migration, every system failure at 2 a.m. that somehow you turned around by dawn;
• Not flinching when COVID hit — keeping our people safe and our voice on the air;
• Protecting the company diligently while building modern, AI-first cybersecurity capabilities;
• Doing whatever was needed to get that show on the air, that production asset delivered, or that promo to pop;
• Streaming all of those live events at record-breaking scale, starting with the Super Bowl in 2019, on infrastructure that was a fraction of what exists today;
• Rebuilding our entire media supply chain, ad tech ecosystem, licensing solutions, and more into genuinely best-in-class technology and operations platforms;
• Embracing the AI opportunity early and bringing others along to advance our capabilities;
• Giving us one final win together — Oracle Fusion in just 15 months, a feat almost no organization at our scale has pulled off.

While delivering on all of this for Paramount, you also kept innovation, technical excellence, and collaboration at the heart of everything we did. You made me proud to be your leader, and I will always be grateful for the privilege of working alongside you.

With deepest gratitude,

Phil