Content owners and content rights holders are racing to offer direct to consumer (d2c)OTT services, and many of these new businesses follow reoccurring subscription and transactional pay-per-view payment models. Digital subscriptions are happening across all industries, but nowhere are they happening faster than in media and entertainment.
Content owners and content rights holders are racing to offer direct to consumer (d2c) OTT services, and many of these new businesses follow reoccurring subscription and transactional pay-per-view payment models. Digital subscriptions are happening across all industries, but nowhere are they happening faster than in media and entertainment.
Successful OTT businesses are generally based around quality premium (paid) content and allow the consumer to choose how and when they want to watch and interact with this content. With premium content, an OTT video subscription and transactional pay-per-view model is a win-win for both the consumer and media companies.
Consumers receive the benefit of quality paid content, while businesses focus on consumer success, earning trust and continually providing new offerings to meet consumers’ high demands. In the end, if businesses meet their customer’s OTT content needs, they will secure recurring revenue and expand new customer opportunities.
In addition, businesses have direct insight into viewers’ usage patterns and can tailor offerings based on programming effectiveness, packaging and pricing using real usage metrics. Many media companies have realized that an OTT video business model built on recurring revenues is a better way to run their business. In order to grow, companies must recognize and operate around four critical values:
Deliver high quality video streaming that operates seamlessly across devices:
Give subscribers a viewing experience that will be hard to forget. Deliver flawless video in the highest quality, including 4K Ultra HD and HDR, eliminating delays, buffering or errors. In a digitally-connected world, viewers have access to multiple devices all day long, enabling them to no longer be confined to one area to watch content. Make your content readily available on all leading consumer devices, including web, PC, tablets, mobile, gaming consoles, smart TVs, streaming devices, VR headsets and more to increase your consumer reach and accessibility.
Offer advanced personalization features and services for individual viewer preferences:
In today’s marketplace, leading OTT services offer viewers personalization features which, in turn, provide genuine viewer attraction and engagement, increasing customer retention. Viewer engagement is enhanced when rights holders create a personalized OTT experience for each individual customer. Ensure your digital platform offers advanced personalization services to give your viewers the opportunity to fully customize their own experience, catered to his or her interests. This not only gives them full control of what they want to watch, when and how they want to watch it, but drives them to consume more content, for longer periods of time.
Make content recommendation tools and search features part of your OTT service:
Let your audience choose their viewing content. By implementing robust content search and discovery features, subscribers should be given the ability to create watch lists, favorites, custom preference settings and more. Whether they find their content to watch through Electronic Program Guides (EPG) or deep recommendations, allow your viewers to navigate your video library with ease to keep them coming back for more.
Nurture and develop deeper customer relationships based on behavior analytics:
Behavior analytics is a key metric into gaining deeper insight to your subscribers’ habits. By analyzing viewer watch, experience and engagement data, you can gather a better understanding of viewing demands and performance to maintain and grow your subscriber base. Using the derived insights, make informed content offerings such as content recommendations; launch personalized marketing campaigns to re-engage inactive users, trend monitoring and more.
Offer a suite of marketing promotions and merchandizing options to viewers:
Do you want loyal, long lasting subscribers? Get creative by offering various marketing promotions and merchandizing options to your viewers. From discount codes, free trials and BOGO deals, to product bundles, gifting and loyalty programs, give your subscribers a reason to come back more often and engage in more content. You can even take it a step further with advanced promotions, by partnering with a third party to drive new interest for your OTT service.
Content packaging and rapidly deploy new pricing product SKUs:
Content packaging is essential in driving new subscribers. Your OTT service should allow you to easily and seamlessly offer your subscribers new content packages and pricing based on current demand, industry trends, time of year and other factors, in order to react and compete with other OTT services in the market and differentiate your service and offering.
Control the purchase experience with support of multiple payment methods, currencies, and languages:
Today’s demand for video content isn’t confined to only one specific region, it is worldwide – so why limit your subscribers to default settings, including
minimal payment methods and languages? Secure a video solution that expands the scope of your OTT service to support your subscribers’ local based needs such as currencies and language. With an end-to-end video solution, the entire purchase experience from global payment support to end-user billing is completely covered by the technology provider, taking the weight off your shoulders.
At the end of the day, shifting to a digitally-based over-the-top service is not easy for all media companies. Challenges range from pricing, selling, billing and payment collection, and can be significantly more complex than in the traditional media world. Internal stakeholders in Marketing, Operations, Finance, IT or General Management, must be prepared and aligned to support this transformation, which often requires knowledge and implementation of new digital processes.
Fortunately, global media companies including the NBA, UFC, NFL, Univision, English Football League, Sky Sports, Carrefour and OTT players like Hotstar, Voot, Sony LIV, Sun NXT, HOOQ, ALT Balaji and others in India and Asia have fast growing, successful OTT services with Technology partners ship with various players to power their services across the entire video ecosystem with complete end-to-end video solution. Such partnerships simplifies the digital video workflow and provides all the tools you need to get your content into consumer’s hands quickly and easily, ensuring they will be loyal, long lasting customers.
