Helping consumers discover the right content—

It is important to do some research and find out what your target audience would love to watch.

Users want service scalability, so they can only pay for what they watch. In such a scenario, having only relevant content on your platform that will grab the audience’s attention and continue to get them hooked is indeed a challenge.

On top of that, users want content recommendations. For that, a powerful recommendation algorithm needs to be used which will enable users to find the right content according to their needs.

It’s also a challenge for content creators. In order to have their content featured in the recommendations offered to the audience, it’s important that they keep creating the kind of content people would approve of and enjoy watching.

For OTT platforms, having a constant supply of content is not much of a challenge as there is a lot of content being constantly produced and promoted by different media sources and content providers. The problem lies in having a constant supply of relevant and good quality content.

Monetizing your services—

You can easily monetize the content on your OTT platform, provided you have quality on offer.

Three models are well-known for monetization—

• Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD)— SVOD allows unlimited access to all programs at a flat monthly rate. Users have complete control over their subscriptions and can choose when they want to begin or stop the program.

• Transcriptional Video on Demand (TVOD)— In TVOD, the content is bought by the consumer on a per-view basis. TVOD services provide more recently released content which is a benefit to rights holders and consumers who can get timely access to new content.

• Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD)—These are free content that can be monetized through video advertising. Here, it’s the advertisers that pay and not the viewers.

Ideally, an OTT platform should try each of these monetization strategies to determine which one is most effective for their content strategy.

Also, keep the payment system simple.

For the growth of your platform, it’s important that users are able to pay using a flexible method of payment. It should not cause them a lot of unnecessary trouble. We are OTT Platform Development Company in India

The user experience should be highly customized—

Users expect a personalized experience when using digital tools. OTT platforms are no exception.

For a personalized experience, it’s important that an OTT platform directs the user to the most relevant content, and allows them to discover what they are interested in. Like every organization, OTT services must manage their customers and do things to keep them happy.

The key features to be considered from a user’s perspective are uncluttered UI and navigation, timely and relevant recommendations, search options, streaming quality, availability across devices, and easy accessibility.

Push notifications are an integral part of user experience. They can be used to ensure that viewers engage with you on a regular basis. However, it’s important to use notifications with caution. Bad push notifications can lead to users abandoning the app. A survey found that 71% of all uninstalls of apps are caused by push notifications. So, are there ways to get push notifications right? Well, you can do the following to make sure your push notifications don’t cause churns.

• Personalization is key— make notifications relevant to the user.
• To increase engagement, send actionable notifications to users.
• Sending too many notifications at once is not a good idea. So, avoid doing that.
• Also, don’t send notifications that look like warnings. Too many warnings will scare away your users.

Content protection and security concerns—

How will you protect your content against piracy? Piracy costs distributors billions of dollars every year. Considering the current trends, piracy is only expected to increase in the times to come.

Besides, it is becoming increasingly difficult for OTT providers to track illegal streaming and piracy as a result of the growth in broadband.

Thankfully, there are many options to protect your content from pirates, including encrypted streaming, Digital Rights Management, password protection, and dynamic watermarking. 

Swifter content delivery—

How are you going to ensure hassle-free content delivery? To earn more customers and have the existing ones sticking around, it’s important to deliver an amazing experience for your customers. Users leave the site if the video takes too long to load. This necessitates swift content delivery.

Most OTT providers have been able to ensure faster content delivery by working with Content Delivery Networks and Video hosting services.

OTT service providers must provide an optimal viewing experience to consumers, without jitters and buffer issues. Besides, the content needs to be good in visual quality. Buffering can cost OTT players nearly a quarter of their audience, based on the average Internet speed.

To address this problem, OTT players have now started to partner with telecom companies.

Analytics/ Reporting—

It is crucial to track metrics in order to make informed business decisions.

Everything— from the kind of content your customers are watching and the locations from where they are accessing your platform to the devices they use to play different content and their age or gender— is important.

Many video hosting services and CDNs offer some analytics and insight into user behavior. They can be extremely beneficial for tracking your progress and devising the right growth strategies.

After you have gathered data about your customers, the next step is to map their behavior. This will help you understand your users better and you will be able to make the right kind of content available for viewing.

OTT platform providers can use analytics and reporting to personalize each user’s experience by trying to predict their preferences and likes. Personalized recommendations are essential for a fulfilling user experience.

Giving users ample control— 

Viewers today consume content across multiple devices. And that is why your content’s compatibility across devices shouldn’t be allowed to surface as an issue. Compatibility issues will hamper your OTT platform’s growth.

Even though the online video industry is gradually moving to just a few major formats, different devices might still require different versions such as HLS, MPEG-dash, or HDS and Smooth Streaming. So, keep yourself prepared.

It’s great to enable users to watch content on any device of their choice, but that’s not enough—users should also be able to watch their favorite content whenever they want, even when they are offline.

The option to download a video to watch later allows the user to better engage with the platform as it allows them to watch content whenever they want without any limitations of the internet speed.

Remember, you can make users feel valued by simply giving them control over their viewing experience. 

Having a strong support system —

Your business will grow and you will need to provide support for your clients. This support should include taking user feedback and updating features, as well as resolving technical issues faster.

But it’s not just your clients that would seek support, even your customers would do.

Customers must be able to communicate with your customer reps quickly and directly for speedy and effective resolution of problems. In other words, your customer service should be quick, direct, and effective.

Service personnel must be trained to provide consistent help and regular updates to customers.