The importance of new markets to the future of OTT

The VOD industry is continuously evolving and Axinom, with over 15 years in the industry, has seen the growth upfront. OTT has gone way beyond VOD, and providers these days are not keen on building a massive content library or procuring please-all kinds of content. It is quite evident that the audience for such content is either already captured by FAANG, or threatened by the upcoming ventures by giants such as Disney or WB OTT.

Off-the-shelf solutions have enabled everyone with an interest in launching their own OTT to move forward, and so we are witnessing an avalanche of OTT services in the market. The European Commission has estimated that there are around 2000 on-demand services in the whole of Europe. Hence, to stand out and be profitable, providers have realised that they need to capture new markets and explore fresh monetisation opportunities.

Axinom has worked with several customers that have recognised the potential of niche content, be it regional or genre specific. Platforms such as Zee5, made up of a large amount of Indian and targeted regional content, saw the subscriber numbers rise to 56 million within a few months of its launch, or Horrify, a platform built for the brave-hearted horror content fans. This proves that there is a big market for targeted content. Moreover, the platform also discovered the demand for Indian content abroad among the Indian diaspora as well as the international viewers, hence they launched the services in 195 countries. The content is now served in more than 15 Indian and foreign languages.

A fundamental step is to think of about the content workflows – how it is sourced, managed, localised, secured and delivered. Massive content libraries and numerous metadata assets pose a challenge when many stakeholders are involved. The modern content management systems are providing automated workflows that can be customised as needed.

For monetisation of such platforms, it becomes crucial that there is integration capability with multiple payment gateways, t-commerce and advertising providers in different regions. Novel monetisation strategies, including bundling with other providers, are also gaining traction in the industry. Consequently, integration becomes even more critical.

Modern digital architecture, built upon microservices and server-less architecture, is providing the required level of scalability and capacity for extension. The modular approach towards the digital backend ensures that integration can be done with any number of payment providers, advertising services, recommendation engines and much more. The new architecture not only provides an economical operation, but it also reduces the time to market and increases the QoS.

The whole industry is moving forward with a common aim to provide the best to all the stakeholders involved. Hence, the industry needs a platform that promotes collaboration and knowledge-sharing. It is clear that IBC Content Everywhere is serving that purpose very well, with expert participants ranging from the front-end to CDN providers. The CE hub provides a very necessary insight into technologies that are helping evolve this industry. Axinom also hopes to share the learning that we have gathered in our years of experience in building OTT and media solutions.

Stefanie Schuster is Chief Commercial Officer at Axinom.