By VVS Nunna
The popularity of OTT and Digital services has seen a meteoric rise in the last few years. With an unprecedented number of new services in the market, and more to come, new players continue to try to establish themselves by offering something exclusive, either by way of monetization models, genre specialization or localized content. The challenge for these new players is to entice consumers to subscribe and pay for yet another OTT service when they already pay for numerous other OTT services.
User Experience Challenges
- Users often struggle to identify the differentiators and content available in each streaming service. This lack of visibility and transparency can affect both service evaluation and content discovery.
- Users with multiple OTT services can find it difficult to track their total spend.
- Each OTT subscription has its own renewal date, making it difficult for some users to manage which services to keep or cancel.
- Remembering IDs and passwords for multiple OTT services can be challenging.
- Changing payment modes and Credit Cards for multiple services can be a hassle.
- Users may find it difficult to keep track of or cancel trials, a hindrance for those that enjoy exploring new services.
Business Opportunity
Communication Service Providers (CSPs) can increase customer retention and stickiness by creating a comprehensive content offering that packages video, music, gaming and other subscriptions together in one place – both licensed and 3rd party services. Bringing together all streaming options into an aggregated centralized user experience, with recommendations to meet customer expectations based upon their usage of content, selection, and purchase behavior, provides an opportunity for CSPs to not only improve the user experience, but also to generate new revenue opportunities. Furthermore, the aggregation of video streaming and gaming, bundled together with other subscription services, is another strategy for CSP’s looking to differentiate themselves.
An aggregation model of bundled services with discounted rates, coupled with single sign-on and multi-device viewing, will enable customers to gain significant value in terms of usability, device compatibility, and affordability.
Vubiquity presents – “Entertainment Suite”
Vubiquity supports Content Providers, CSP’s and Pay-TV providers to achieve their business goals and deliver this valuable type of offering to their consumers. Vubiquity’s one stop shop solution – ‘Entertainment Suite’ is a centralized hub for all OTT video, delivered with a unified customer experience. It provides a true end-to-end service, including system integration, cloud streaming video platform, intuitive user interfaces, billing integration, encoding, metadata management, licensed content covering all commercial models (SVOD, TVOD, EST, AVOD, Linear), and third-party OTT partnerships.
Things to consider when launching your next generation OTT Service TV platform
Building a sustainable OTT service is a technically complex process; further complicated by evolving technologies and changing consumer behaviors. Deciding when and how to approach an OTT aggregation initiative requires strategic planning and multiple considerations such as:
- Content acquisition and service delivery
- Metadata management and recommendations
- User onboarding with single sign-on for multiple OTT partner services
- Bundling subscriptions
- Partner lifecycle management
- Capturing user data and user lifecycle management
- Scale of integration
- Hyper personalization
- Multi-device viewing experience
- Time to market
What can we expect to see going forward?
- In a saturated marketplace, bundling and partnerships will continue to be imperative to reducing subscriber churn and maintaining a customer base with longevity.
- Linear channels, FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV), video on-demand, gaming and interactive content will become an expectation across all service providers.
- OTT services will benefit immensely from 5G network deployment which claims to be 10x times faster and enable a 50% reduction in latency. Therefore, 5G will enable OTT players to deliver improved user experience at marginally lowered costs.
- We can also expect Virtual Reality and 360-degree live-streaming with 5G network connectivity. So, overall, the streaming experience will soon become more immersive.
- Streaming localized content is another major trend that will make content more accessible to viewers in different locations, thus helping brands and content owners to expand their reach, connect with a larger audience and further monetize their content.
- We can expect more FAST channels as part of the OTT offering. By dynamically inserting ads into the would-be ad break, FAST channels can be offered at no cost to the viewer, making it an attractive value-add option.
There are many aspects to consider in the world of OTT. Hopefully this blog has provided a useful introduction to the key considerations for building a state-of-the-art OTT platform that is fit to take the market by storm, allowing you to go head-on with your competition! To learn more about our OTT super aggregation platform “Entertainment Suite” visit HERE.
