OTT business is appealing to many companies and organizations because it is a convenient way to build relationships with customers and monetize content. But when running a video streaming service, you face significant challenges. You need to attract and retain customers, keep up with technological developments, create marketing campaigns, and deal with content delivery and distribution.
With the evolution of the OTT market, these aspects can become even more challenging and pressing. Let’s observe some of them.
3 Challenges for OTT Service Providers
Technology to run a video streaming service
To run a video streaming service, operators develop or obtain an OTT solution. The market offers multiple OTT solutions with various feature sets. Staying up-to-date and remaining competitive in the market requires leveraging the latest technologies. It means investing in new hardware and software that can:
- Ensure high-quality streaming. The solution should have advanced encoding and transcoding features so that viewers watch videos without buffering and in the highest possible quality.
- Deliver content to various devices, including TVs, tablets, mobile phones, and desktop computers. It is essential since viewers appreciate watching videos on devices they want.
- Secure your content and user data. As a content creator, you probably want to secure your original content from unauthorized access. For this reason, it is better to have an appropriate security system.
- Ensure a smooth content delivery. You will likely want to deliver content with minimal delays and interruptions. Investing in CDN and delivery technologies may help you achieve that goal.
- Provide you with analytics, monetization models, customization, and other features essential for you and your viewers.
- Choose deployment method: on prem vs cloud.
Make sure that the solution you obtain has all features necessary for your business goals.
Competing for viewers’ attention
There are multiple OTT providers available in the market, and a new business should stand out to attract customers.
You can use the customization feature embedded in the solution for video streaming. It allows you to use your brand color and fonts in design. With the design, you can convey ideas about your business and be appealing to viewers.
Also, you can win users’ attention by offering unique content or targeting a specific audience, solving their problems. With advanced delivery technology, you will be able to transmit content anywhere, even creating a global community.
Invest in different marketing channels to attract as many viewers as possible. Use the power of social media to communicate with these people and learn more about them.
Don’t forget to track analytics, as it will give you valuable insights about your viewers. You will be able to understand their preferences and interests, which will help you enhance the content you create.
Providing premium quality of experience
Quality of experience means ensuring that the video quality is high, buffering is minimized, the content library is rich, and viewers can receive personalized recommendations. Also, it can refer to offering several purchase options and multiple profiles.
Here, the technology you use is essential as well. It will help you provide a streaming experience without delays and buffering, and viewers will watch videos without interruptions.
Make sure your content library is rich and viewers have many videos to watch. Content is king, and it is what keeps your users engaged.
You may also provide a recommendation engine, which analyzes a user’s viewing history and offers recommendations based on it.
Final Thoughts
Running a video streaming service means that you will face multiple challenges. It is better to know how to address them in advance or even solve them beforehand. For example, obtaining the right OTT solution from the very beginning will help you avoid multiple problems.
