Maximize Viewer Engagement With New OTT Flow Features

As the democratization of video content continues to empower consumers with more viewing choices than ever, content owners face enormous pressure to deliver a compelling experience to maximize audience engagement, convert new users, and reduce churn.

The power of OTT Flow is delivering a service that enables customers to get to market quickly with a low total cost of ownership. That said, this offering should not be construed as a compromise from a premium service. Apps utilizing OTT Flow are frequently featured in the various app stores alongside bespoke offerings. At Brightcove, we strive to provide the best for our customers and, as OTT Flow continues to gain traction within the industry, we continue to enhance its feature set and integrate with the latest platforms as they become available.

Brightcove deploys new features and functionality on a rolling basis, allowing our customers to focus on what really matters, customer acquisition, maximizing user engagement, and reducing churn. Below are  highlights of the new features and functionality, along with use cases to see the features in action.

Cross-device Functionality

We have put a lot of energy on cross-device functionality. This is an important set of features because viewers are now able to mark content as a Favorite to be added to a Watchlist and are also able to Continue Watching where they last stopped across different platforms. This makes it easier for viewers to track their favorite videos, movies, or series and enables ease of access across devices keeping viewers engaged.

Favorites

Viewers watching on an OTT Flow powered service can easily mark a video or a series as a Favorite by clicking on the heart icon, adding it to a list of all their favorite content on any of their connected devices with the app. Viewers can now easily navigate to the content when and where they want to watch it.

Continue Watching

When a viewer pauses or stops a video or a clip, there will be a bookmark automatically applied to the spot which enables them to resume where they left off. This is highlighted by a progress bar on the video details page, for video items in a collection page, as well as with a resume playback button, which will start the next logical video for the viewer.

Control Chromecast from the Web

Enabling an advanced Chromecast sender experience allows viewers to fully control the video stream that is seen on the connected TV, while still being able to browse for more content on their PC. In addition to providing a great viewing experience both on the website and TV, viewers now have a true second screen experience.

Binge Watching

Binge watching is second nature for many viewers in today’s OTT landscape.. When there is 15 seconds left in the video the viewer will receive a prompt with a countdown timer in the corner, informing them when the next video will be starting.

Conditional Hero Container to Optimize Conversions

To help drive conversions, the Hero container has been optimized to better support promoting content, advertising the service, and providing a call-to-action that entices viewers with a free trial or subscription signup. Once authenticated, the viewer will not see this promotion and will receive direct access to the content.

Advanced Footer Menu

There is now a fully configurable menu at the bottom of an OTT Flow app’s website. This allows content owners to set up links to drive users to other parts of the app as well as displaying contact information and respective social media networks.

Related Content on Collection Page

Keeping viewers on the app as long as possible is the goal, so helping them to discover new content is critical. OTT Flow has extended support for presenting "related content" to the collection pages so that editors can promote similar content to keep users watching even more videos and increase engagement.

Multi-currency Support

One of the benefits of an OTT service is that viewers can watch the content in any country the service is available. However, this can make billing for SVOD services difficult. To address this concern, OTT Flow has improved support for customers who are offering their service in multiple countries. By default, the current exchange rate is applied to each offer as it is made available in a different country. Now, customers have the ability to create country specific subscription models making it easier to present more attractive pricing to viewers worldwide and giving content owners full control on how they wish to price the service in the different marketplaces.

OTT Flow maintains an active roadmap with increased functionality being delivered frequently.  In addition to the above, we have recently released the following:

iOS Updates

• Mobile “splash” screens to increase branding
• Enable background audio playback from lock screen
• Collection Page UI enhancements
• Navigation Item UI enhancements
• Hero Container Items can have have an option Call to Action button.

Android Updates

• Mobile “splash” screens to increase branding
• Sortable search results
• Hero Container Items can have have an option Call to Action button.
• List Container Items support the Short Description field from Brightcove

We encourage our customers to explore these new features to delight your end users and look forward to continuing to build new innovative features and functionality to help content owners build premium and profitable OTT experiences.