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"OTT is an undeniable trend that transcends geographical boundaries to reach customers worldwide. With this, it is time for marketers — irrespective of size and location — to seek OTT development services to deliver directly to a more targeted audience and reinvent revenue models."
With social distancing becoming the lifestyle and lockdowns a recurring phenomenon, the traditional entertainment drivers have apparently come to a lurching halt. Movie theaters are no longer receiving heavy footfalls, and the escalating COVID-19 crisis primarily forces viewers to stay indoors. While the rife pandemic brings hours of freedom and solitude for viewers, OTT (Over-the-Top) makes sure they don’t miss going out.
Amidst COVID-19, more and more viewers have resorted to different OTT platforms, resulting in a 30% increase in viewership. A recent report informs that the global OTT market reached worth $161.37 Billion in 2020. When compared to 2019, the market has grown at a CAGR of 55% approximately. So it’s clear. On-demand streaming is people’s new favorite, and this infatuation is not going to end any sooner, even in the post-COVID-19 world.
So, the big question that arises is how OTT is shaping amidst the ongoing paradigm shift. With the unprecedented speed at which customers adopt OTT platforms, an enormous opportunity landscape remains void for businesses to fill with their success stories. Companies must align their marketing strategies with OTT to discover new use cases, build stronger customer relationships, and leapfrog the competition curve. For instance, the following are some of the business benefits, put briefly.
• Better brand awareness and positioning
• Improved value for customers
• Targeted advertising and new revenue streams
• Augmented content delivery and monetization
• Continuous innovation through video APIs
• Increased customer engagement
• Personalized experiences for customers
• Customization in correspondence with marketing strategies
Why does OTT platform development turn out to be of critical importance for businesses?
There’s no denying that OTT takes precedence over all the conventional methodologies to reach a prospective audience or put more appropriately, prospective buyers. And businesses across industries are evermore yearning to pursue custom OTT app development and capitalize on the opportunity to walk through competitive inroads. Let’s understand why.
- Ad-supported OTT platforms
OTT platforms are no longer restricted to providing just entertainment. Businesses are approaching ad-supported streaming service providers to reach customers in a more targeted and defined manner. OTT content has significantly disrupted primetime. Thus, on-demand streaming channels become brands’ favorites for advertising their products and services among consumers. Statista informs, “OTT users are more receptive to advertisements than TV viewers.” Companies must include OTT in their digital marketing plan to schedule their promotions and advertisements in line with region, demographic, and consumers to garner maximum engagement and opportunities.
- Continuously increasing OTT users
With over 3.5 Billion people of the world’s total population using smartphones, OTT potentially is the turnkey to reach a more extensive customer base. In the United States alone, the number of OTT users will reach over 198 Million by 2021, informs Statista. When we check similar facts, there are 180 Million users in the Southeast Asian region. They spend 8 Billion hours per month on various streaming platforms. Additionally, Forbes informs that in 2019 alone, conventional TV companies and satellite channels lost 6 Million consumers and over 53 Million in total. If we believe a report published by eMarketer, over 14 Million viewers will part their ways from pay-TV to become cord-cutters, and in the next five years, OTT viewers will outperform pay-TV subscribers.
- Rising demand for omnichannel experiences
Digital-age consumers have smart devices and super-fast internet connectivity at their disposal, which triggers the demand for omnichannel experiences concerning media content access. In the given scenario, OTT-apps allow on-demand content accessibility, whether audio or video, on virtually every compatible device. According to a report, although millennial OTT users prefer streaming content on mobile devices, TV sets will be used by over 60 million people in the next five years. Be it specific streaming devices or be it smart TVs and smartphones, digital-age consumers want to stream media content anywhere, anytime, and across devices.
- Consumers want content to be personalized
Building OTT-app strategies can help brands deliver personalized content to consumers. Unlike traditional broadcasting mediums, OTT platforms offer complete agility. An increasing number of companies approach OTT app development services providers to remodel their engagement with prospective customers. On-demand streaming platforms integrate disruptive technology forces such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics, cloud, IoT, and more to track the content usage pattern. Therefore, companies can build targeted marketing strategies, conflating both data and design to reach a wide array of customers through OTT platforms and that too in their preferred language.
Should businesses build OTT business models in pursuit of content monetization?
OTT has converged different program formats. It offers a one-stop platform for disparate formats, including drama, history, discovery, lifestyle shows, short series, documentaries, children’s programs, and movies. With a cyclical increase in digital accessibility, companies must consider building OTT models to attain content monetization and reap other benefits underlying. The following are some of the key reasons why businesses should seek OTT development without further ado.
• Ingestion automation — To ensure high-quality content delivery, OTT providers need to mitigate risks and control failures. And automating content ingestion is the best way to achieve that level of excellence. It enables caching and purging, multimedia content collection, content asset management, and more. In short, ingestion automation reduces operational costs to a great extent and refines the workflow across endpoints.
• API-integration — API (Application Programming Interface) is the direct route to agility and innovation. Digital media broadcasters, including OTT providers, can lean on API integration to combine data sources and revisit data patterns to allow viewers to stream at will high-quality and customized content across multiple compatible devices, with complete security and mobility.
• Content syndication — OTT models are a more meaningful way to practice content syndication and leapfrog your content marketing performance. It allows OTT providers to reach hyper-targeted consumers and meet the continuously rising content streaming demands by efficiently publishing/republishing content on third-party platforms.
• Enhance security and optimize workflow — With the growth of OTT, piracy ought to grow. A report by Statista predicts, by 2022, piracy will account for a loss worth $51.6 Billion in the global online TV and movie industry. Therefore, companies can leverage cloud-based OTT solutions. It allows OTT service providers to harness SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) models to deploy robust security measures to avoid piracy and data breaches and ensure complete compliance while distributing and authenticating internet TV content.
COVID-19 supercharges the entertainment rift and OTT bridges the gap
The conventional entertainment industry would have continued whimpering for most of 2020, with a fraught silence. Thankfully, OTT emerged to help businesses build a scaffold and fend off the epochal crisis. However, the global OTT market is yet to witness remarkable growth. According to a report, by 2026, the market will grow by 19.1% to reach $438.5 Billion.
A topping trend, OTT consists of distinguishing features that global media and entertainment companies are harnessing to forge new OTT business models and engineer cloud-based services to practice agility in correspondence with the continuously changing consumer behavior.
