The world today has moved from OTT being a niche market to a mass-market product. With the explosion of hyper-personalized audiovisual content creation and distribution, waiting for your favorite shows to air on TV and sitting through never-ending advertisements is a thing of the past. The digital media industry is more dynamic, complex, and uber-competitive than ever before.
Stay-at-home has rapidly catalyzed the pace of this transition in the past few years. The global OTT market size was forecasted to reach USD 1,039.03 Billion by 2027 from USD 121.61 Billion in 2019. This was fueled by a rise in demand for OTT services in developing regions of the world, the growth of an array of revenue models like SVOD, AVOD, TVOD; the availability of a wide gamut of content, an ever-increasing demand for live streaming channels, and latest industry trends & developments.
As the OTT business continues to expand, new expectations and challenges are on the horizon. Backed by an ever-increasing user base, content creators, and competitive data prices; OTT players are battling for a share of the consumer pie.
It won’t be wrong to say that 2020-2021 was the year of OTT with consumers seeking out digital entertainment both within and beyond their comfort zones. As OTT continues to reimagine content consumption, consumers now stream videos across multiple devices beyond their living rooms: on smart TVs, mobile devices, desktops, or laptops- both on small and big screens, from browsers or apps – anywhere, anytime!  OTT has unquestionably ushered in a new world order with something for everyone.
It’s true: technology at the core will revolutionize the next generation of OTT delivery. In the quest to offer a seamless viewing experience, embracing cutting-edge technologies and addressing challenges with a new perspective to achieve customer growth & retention; an increase in ARPU is key.
DIGITAL CONTENT TRANSFORMATIONÂ
It is essential to make postproduction less cumbersome, fast, fueled by insights, and cost-effective. It is imperative to build trust and ensure that content is secure and respects consumer privacy.
Technology is a driver of the OTT revolution. Imagine a post-production world where you can have content watermarked, have DRM/NFT-DRM, and derive insights for content fragmentation and localization for wide and effective reach before you finally schedule the content for consumption – tech has undoubtedly unplugged endless possibilities.
Here’s how technology is playing a pivotal role in enabling end-to-end OTT content:
- End to End content security: Protect your content with forensic watermarking and DRM solutions.
- AI for Augmenting Creativity: AI can support building an efficient content discovery mechanism and a robust recommendation engine to predict how well-received the content is across geographies and select the best scenes to create relevant teasers or advertisements basis several parameters.
- AI-assisted localization: Review existing media libraries to enable faster content discovery and creating new channels of revenue generation with accurate platform revenue analysis. Increased internet penetration and expansion of OTT reach with smart, data-driven predictions also makes a strong case for the consumption of more foreign language content than ever before. AI can help understand viewing patterns to gauge which streaming service offers higher content success to choose the right channel based on localization. This can be rewarding for a platform owner to determine the best pricing strategy.
- Content Storage: Blockchain-powered innovation in OTT can go a long way in building trust around content storage. Being devoid of a centralized entity, blockchain can provide proof of ownership and can automate existing royalty payment processes with greater transparency based on video streaming. This can lead to enhanced licensing and monetization opportunities through smart contracts without compromising user confidentiality. Moreover content of varied types and size can be licensed, tracked, and used exclusively by permitted users with the help of an embedded blockchain-based system.
- Digital Time stamping: Data privacy is critical to the success of OTT. An OTT platform’s reputation could be at stake if it fails to protect consumer data, its source code and premium content. Blockchain can secure OTT content against cyberattacks, data breaches, or piracy to prevent theft and unauthorized access to or utilization of creative work with digital timestamping.
- AI for Recommendations: AI can help construct a powerful recommendation engine to provide attention-grabbing and relevant content by ensuring a competent platform. Based on user persona, clicks and the total amount of time spent on watching a particular content, what time it is played or a deep analysis of the user’s watch history, platform owners can dive deep into this data and use AI to provide highly personalized content recommendations. This can be a terrific technique to ensure a lower bounce rate, hold the audience’s attention for a longer durations, or even develop tailor-made trailers or shows that appeal to a user’s sentiments or interests.
ADVERTISEMENT SERVICESÂ
It is critical to have a Consumer Data Privacy & Personalization in place. It’s important to measure effectiveness of AdTech expenditure and ad verification for precise targeting and eliminating waste. This will eventually lead to increased user engagement and consistent, quality experience.
- Ad verification: AI can enable quick detection of ad frauds and eliminate them by scrutinizing data from various sources.
- AI for hyper-personalized advertising: AI & deep analytics in the Direct-to-Consumer Platforms/Streaming services, can leverage user personas to provide access to personal data. This helps create personalized advertisements to suit consumer tastes. Content reaches individuals wherever and whenever they want it and adapts to their context. With new revenue models coming into the picture, this intelligent personalization of OTT ads will ensure effective and high user engagement.
- Video indexing in OTT advertising: OTT platforms use an ad-hoc indexing process based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) that improves user engagement and ad performance, taking OTT video advertising and AI marketing to the next level.
- Targeted marketing and advanced advertising: OTT advertisement is the exciting new world. Blockchain allows focused marketing investment which helps marketers measure marketing efforts and their efficiency. For example, greater transparency is possible for tracking an actual impression (i.e., actual viewing) empowering advertisers who make use of agencies or platforms to audit ad campaigns.
DIGITAL TRANSACTION TRACEABILITY
- Blockchain royalty payment framework: Does anyone want a middleman? None. Blockchain can help remove intermediaries and provide payment traceability for content creators and publishers while facilitating greater visibility for advertisers.
- Micropayments: A blockchain-enabled web browser with a native cryptocurrency wallet can help a user manage the monthly expenditures on the content he consumes, making payments directly via on-chain payment.
EXPERIENCE, ENGAGEMENT & REPORTINGÂ
- Immersive experience: VR provides an immersive experience that helps in the elevation of brand engagement. It allows content distributors to understand experience patterns so they can push relevant content and finetune their monetization models.
- Audience engagement: Audience engagement is the way of converting attendees into active participants. Metaverse/VR is an excellent platform for engaging with a target audience. Meta/VR can provide an incredible interactive experience to the audience by transforming the entire experience, for instance, enabling personalized and faster customer service.
- 360-degree live streaming: With the help of 360-degree live-streaming, viewers can experience a video in any direction and can also record it.
- Real-Time Analytics & Reporting: Using real-time analytics, brands can make informed decisions about designing creative ways to enhance the entertainment quotient of their content.
Every video streaming platform is trying to improve customer experience, work on faster go-to-market strategies to offer multi-device support and ensure steady customer growth with improved retention. While it will be interesting to see how OTT evolves in a rapidly changing marketplace, there is no doubt that digital technologies will play a crucial role in shaping its exciting future.
is an Associate Director in Media and Entertainment Domain of Product Engineering Services at Happiest Minds Technologies Limited. He has 14+ years of extensive experience in digital transformation and Product Engineering. Shantanu is passionate about Product Management, New technologies and GTM strategies.
