What should you consider when scaling your OTT offering?

The video industry is evolving rapidly, despite an uncertain last couple of years. Consumer’s appetite for new offerings and content is growing, which has led many new companies to penetrate the market. Considering how fast the dynamics in the ecosystem are changing lately, it’s no longer enough for service providers to just maintain the status quo to remain viable to their users; instead, an ever-increasing focus on optimization is necessary.

The video delivery infrastructure is complex and requires constant enhancements to distribute an engaging offering. To deliver that, it’s critical to have a robust foundation in place to ensure your OTT service can continue to grow and differentiate from the competition. Hence, continuously evaluating and optimizing your product, the features, and third-party integrations can set you up for success. 

A few key things to note when scaling your OTT offering are:

‍Own the platform migration process

Integrating various tools from different vendors is a tedious process, even more so if you plan to migrate to a whole new platform. It is a daunting and complicated task as it can directly lead to subscriber churn if the end-user experience is affected, eventually hurting your bottom line. 

For example, if you want to ensure the right subscribers continue to access the right content, identity and subscription management, including payment processing, should be handled seamlessly during the migration process. And, content curation, metadata updates/additions, and video migration needs to be handled carefully when moving to a new platform in order for content discovery to remain simple. 

All the above mentioned processes are intertwined, and adding or replacing different tools can be expensive and time-consuming. The catalyst behind Accedo One Marketplace is that it makes it easier for video service providers to create/recreate OTT integrations or switch between third-party vendors without impacting the end-user experience or the interlinked applications.

Make better decisions with data analytics

Making the most use of your analytics tools to infer performance insights for your service is the first step to making data-driven decisions. As your OTT service grows, understanding what changes to user experience affects your consumer engagement, or which content recommendations lead to increased viewership, will guide the optimization decisions for different parts of your offering. 

Many analytics tools provide high-level information on your video service's current performance with an overview of different metrics. However, they still lack the ability to recommend practical optimization insights. Even if there were any effective suggestions, you need responsive systems in your infrastructure that allow you to make quick and easy adjustments. 

Additionally, when a particular change/optimization is implemented, such as adding a new feature or replacing a third-party vendor, the OTT data analytics tool should have the flexibility to measure any kind of impact on consumer engagement and satisfaction to drive further actions.

‍Ensure quality and stability

In an increasingly competitive market, offering a video service of high quality and stability is the baseline expectation of the end-users. Owning a reliable and scalable infrastructure, and an effective validation process for third-party integrations, allows you to maintain the quality of your end product. This is becoming increasingly important because even a minor drop in quality could lead to subscriber churn and, subsequently, revenue loss.

An easily overlooked, but highly impactful, benefit of improving video quality is a decreased cost for customer support. Accedo recently worked with a client to replace a large in-house development team with the Accedo One SaaS platform. We achieved high end-user satisfaction and engagement scores by delivering a stable and high-quality platform while handling a complex migration process. This directly resulted in our client saving nearly 1 million USD/year due to a 75% reduction in customer support calls.

Optimize the user experience

Most OTT service providers recognize that content will continue to play a crucial role in attracting new users. But, that will only take a service so far. Customers tend to return to a particular service due to an intuitive/engaging user experience a platform offers them. Many service providers fail to put enough focus on the importance of user experience when evaluating new vendors.

We have observed that many video service providers are still focused on tech-driven requirements during the procurement process rather than emphasizing the overarching business case and the end-user experience. Providing a high-quality service goes beyond just adding new features and functionalities to your platform. It involves understanding your user’s journey, how they interact with your app, and what path they take to discover the content they desire, including what is an unpleasant experience for them while using your platform. Learning how your users behave can equip you with opportunities to enhance your service, stay ahead of the game, and entice your customers to return. ‍

Scale your service over time

As you grow and scale your service, you are likely to integrate with third-party vendors that facilitate evolution. If your underlying infrastructure isn’t set up to handle the level of scale you desire for your service, your service might end up falling short of consumer expectations, and eventually losing subscribers to a competitor. It is worth noting that cloud-based infrastructure and ease of integration are two key points to consider for scaling over time.

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Our team at Accedo has worked on several migration projects whose services range from 50K to over 1M subscribers. Success for these projects goes way beyond careful planning; it involves managing seamless partner relationships for a frictionless end-user transition. We’ve taken these learnings from our experience and built Accedo One Marketplace to support video providers in being nimble in their technology choices and business decisions. Accedo One empowers your service to thrive, enabling you to easily upgrade your platform whenever the market conditions demand it while ensuring an enriching user experience.

Learn more about how our powerful SaaS platform can guide you to scale your service. Book a demo with one of our platform experts.