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SCREEN AFRICA EXCLUSIVE: Over-the-Top (OTT) services are now well and truly in the mainstream of broadcast operations. It isn't just big national/international broadcasters that are investing heavily in OTT provision. Many smaller organisations are launching OTT services - but are the business issues facing all broadcasters the same. In this article, I look at the big OTT picture and asks when smaller or regional broadcasting channels decide to shift to OTT, what are some aspects they should keep in mind with the technology implementation?
What impacts the cost of OTT services?One of the great benefits of an OTT strategy is that the costs associated with a successful channel launch can often be minimised through the use of cloud and social media channel origination and delivery services. Social media is often times a great tool for creating awareness around a broadcaster's brand, entice new viewers to their programme offerings and affordably distribute content to a broad audience. Cloud solutions provide the programmer with the ability to rapidly try out new delivery approaches, different promotions and novel programming line-ups to entice a broader audience. Whether as second screen experiences or as a premium channel, social media and cloud origination can dramatically cut up front investment costs and enable rapid development of an internet scale audience. While OTT delivery costs often scale with the size of the audience, novel approaches provide a path to testing and validating audience response to your programming and marketing efforts without the need for very large initial investments. It's not uncommon for programmers and broadcasters to leverage cloud services and social media to develop the audience, and once established, look to pull ownership of the end user experience, video hosting, ad trafficking and content rights enforcement in-house. While this can increase costs, it can enable the programmer unique audience insights and new monetisation opportunities.
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As mentioned, cloud service offerings can deliver value by scaling out much of the technology investment typically associated with new content channel launches. However, it's not uncommon for there to be requirements that may benefit from investment in on-premises accelerated processing appliances and private cloud deployments that are optimised for fast content turn around and processing of large libraries without the overhead associated with moving large files in and out of cloud service offerings. Ensuring that the technology stack supports the optimum mix of on-premises, private and public cloud deployment options can be essential to launching a new channel and supporting growth and scale.
Another factor a new OTT service requires at launch is a differentiation strategy; focusing on premium features like quality (4K, HDR, Premium Audio, etc ), library size or exclusivity, content localisation and others enhancements designed to entice subscribers or broader audience engagement. While content transcoding for the OTT marketplace may seem to benefit from commodity transcoding services, the overall business drivers will often require very sophisticated tools to implement those differentiators at scale. Choosing technology partners who offer premium capabilities in a deployment model that makes sense for the business is a critical element to a successful channel launch.
What's a prudent ROI for OTT implementation and its success rate?
Return on investment (ROI) may vary depending on the business model for the OTT implementation. Advertising based programming, subscription services, and transaction oriented OTT channels will each have different approaches to garnering audience share and optimising costs. A common thread for ensuring ROI across platforms is to have good visibility in to what features of the OTT service are delivering the most bang for the buck . It's very important to not only deliver a differentiated experience, but to also measure how the audience experience is being received. Actionable analytics that enable you to dynamically monitor video and network quality all the way down to the player is an essential component of successful OTT channels.
Programming delivered over-the-top enables the broadcaster unprecedented capabilities to interact and entice a direct audience. Being able to understand and rapidly react to production and distribution problems that are impacting audience engagement are critical. An abundance of indexes that measure the overall Quality of Experience being delivered, in multiple geographies and across delivery networks combined with a rich set of analytics that describe how audience engagement varied with those performance indexes enables smart investment with the production and delivery solutions that are most benefiting your audience. Investment in QoS/QoE monitoring ensures that a new channel launch excites the audience while providing almost immediate ROI in the form of service optimisations that can dramatically reduce operational expenses.
Boost audiences by targeting specific viewers
For broadcasters, it's essential to reach increased numbers of viewers while optimising costs. Audience reach can be delivered in a number of ways. Many OTT services are increasingly leveraging live programming to entice new viewers. Delivering a live experience while blasting real-time highlights out to your social media followers is a highly cost effective way to create brand and programme awareness. Compelling editorial metadata enriches the content, creating relevance and searchability that, when missing, can be very frustrating and lead to a poor viewer experience.
Metadata driven content discovery also lends itself to audience engagement. An extensive VOD library is only a differentiator if
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