Optimizing Your OTT Video Platform Strategy

How do you reach viewers across the ever increasing and fragmented device landscape including web, mobile, and connected TV devices? How do you maximize audience growth and engagement on the platforms that matter for your business?

Let's take a closer look at how to address some of these questions we've heard from our customers about launching an OTT service.

Reaching and Engaging Your Viewers

When it comes to developing a platform strategy, more is not necessarily better and one size doesn’t necessarily fit all. Factors that you will want to consider when evaluating which platforms to prioritize for your OTT service include:

• Target audience demographics. What devices are used to consume content by your targeted viewers? By region? By age?
• Content type (Long form/short form). Is your content best suited for a lean forward (web/mobile) or lean backward (connected TV) experience? Both?
• Cost of platform specific development. Developing apps for each platform can be expensive and difficult to maintain. Device manufacturers are not able to keep up with the evolving OS platforms resulting in a fragmented landscape. How many versions of Android will you need to maintain support for?
• Monetization effectiveness. For your content and monetization objectives (AVOD and/or SVOD), are you choosing the right platforms?

There are a number of studies and reports that can assist you in better understanding your target audience, content effectiveness across platforms, and monetization by platform and service. For example, a PayWizard Survey found that Mobile devices are the most popular options for watching paid OTT TV content. Or FreeWheel’s Video Monetization Report indicates 63% of monetization is now occurring outside of Desktop environments.

Test and Measure

Getting your apps on your target platforms is just the beginning. How do you measure success? Are you maximizing the value of your content? Are you keeping your viewers engaged?

Measuring app downloads and app store ratings will help you understand your effectiveness in converting interested users into engaged users. Video and app analytics will help you take the next step in understanding how and where your content is being consumed, how your apps are behaving on each platform, and monetization effectiveness.

Do you want to know what the most popular content is on an iPhone, on a Saturday, in London? Is application load time resulting in user churn? Are users exiting at the first ad?

Taking this a step further, multivariate testing is a critical tool for optimizing your content and app design across your demographic profiles and until recently has been a rare utility. We’re very excited to have added this capability to our OTT Flow offering.

Ability to Adapt

Understanding viewer behavior will help you maximize viewer engagement and optimize your OTT apps to deliver the best user experience. However, this task raises additional questions.

What are the right updates to make? Do the updates apply to everyone or specific demographics or regions? Do I need to submit my apps for app store approval each time?

When taking your content over the top you are choosing to extend the reach of your content. This should be a calculated decision that allows you to get the most out of your content.

Brightcove OTT Flow, powered by Accedo, is designed to maximize your market opportunity, and enable you to do so without starting out in a financial hole. OTT Flow’s application management console enables you to get to your targeted platforms easily, is managed from an extensible, centralized console that enables you to support new devices quickly, and allows you to publish app updates without requiring the re-submission of your apps for app store approval.

OTT Flow ties this all together with rich analytics that help you measure content usage, QoE, and application level metrics at a glance and with the ability to drill down on specific titles, players, apps, and regions.