The five core drivers for a successful OTT business

Cisco predicts that by 2019, video will account for 80% of all internet traffic, and mobile data traffic will increase 800% within the next five years – with more people having handsets than electricity.

The amount of content being streamed over the internet has increased immensely, resulting in rapid growth in content consumption across OTT services.

With this comes increasing consumer demand. We are seeing a shift in the traditional ‘TV experience’ of appointment-based viewing locked to one location at one specific time, on one standard linear screen – to personalised, interactive viewing experiences powering multi-screen and multi-device offerings available anytime, anywhere.

To stay on top, here are five core drivers your digital video platform must engage to ensure OTT success:

Deliver impeccable video quality. One in five viewers will abandon poor experiences immediately and will likely not return, so give your viewers a reason to stay. Monitor bandwidth and deliver video in adaptive bit rates to ensure the right quality is reaching the right device at the right time, reducing video buffering. Do you really want to ‘wow’ your viewers? Stream content in ultra HD quality, in up to 4K and embrace HDR video for any size screen.

Engage your viewers by creating the ultimate interactive viewing experiences. Engagement leads to extended viewership. From personalised content libraries curated specifically for the viewer to instant replays and slow motion viewing, delivering highly customised and multi-content experiences of video, articles, and photos, tailored directly to your individual viewers will give them more incentive to consume more content – and for longer.

Leverage any combination of business models to unlock and drive additional revenue. OTT by nature is not ‘one-size-fits-all.’ Choose one, all or any combination of business models to drive purposeful ROI to scale and exceed your business needs, including subscription, authenticated, pay-per-view, ad-supported and electric sell-through/ purchase.

Put an end to the guessing game. Your OTT business is only as strong as the quality of service. Leverage actionable insights and real-time business analytics to monitor your viewer’s quality of service and experience for live and on-demand content. The offering set should also give you real-time insight into customer activations, including app downloads, registrations, purchases, logins and more.

Be everywhere your viewers are, anytime on any device. By 2020, there will be 3.4 connected devices per person, according to Cisco. To keep up with this demand and maximise reach, your OTT platform needs to extend across multiple screens and easily scale to new devices, whether it be desktop, mobile, tablet, gaming consoles, streaming devices or Smart TVs and more.

“Stream content in UHD quality in up to 4K and embrace HDR video for any size screen”

When launching and building a digital video business, you have enough to worry about. You have one chance to reach viewers and give them an experience they won’t forget.

Choosing to build your business on a platform that powers the entire digital video workflow is critical. At the end of the day, it will save you time and money.

And consider limiting the number of vendors involved in your OTT projects. This will reduce complexity and project risk, plus speed time to market for your OTT service.