4 Reasons Why Your OTT Platform is Failing

OTT Platform

TechsPlace | You are a CTO of a company that delivers Sports content and want to digitally transform your business to create a bigger impact and reach a wider audience. You decide to create an OTT platform to have better control over your premium content and monetize your user base.

Without enough research on your audiences and what they love watching, you start uploading original videos on your newly created OTT platform. Not only was the user interface less appealing, but the platform lacked the intelligence to help you understand your audiences’ needs better.

Next, you start pumping in marketing dollars to promote your content and introduce a new section meant for ‘Entertainment’. Isn’t that what businesses do? Unfortunately, this was another failed attempt at increasing your user base and you don’t even have a retention strategy in place.

You’re losing subscribers because of the bad user experience and bigger issues on the platform such as bad video quality, lag issues, unresponsiveness of the platforms, archaic monetizing models, etc.

Lack of website visitors, insignificant app downloads, low number of subscribers, and exhausting budgets finally led you to scrape the platform. You have now lost a big chunk of your budgets meant for strategic initiatives and you have no ROI to show. And then you finally wake up to thank your stars that it was just a dream – you haven’t made a bad business decision yet and you have your time & money intact.

Your biggest learning from this dream is that –

  1. Digital transformation of your content business is a great idea to increase your user base
  2. You don’t have to do it all by yourself and simply outsource your OTT development

Let’s dig into some major reasons why your OTT platform is failing.

 

Lack of Understanding Your Audience

Before starting your platform, you need to understand your audience and their preferences. What they like, how they prefer their content, what devices they use most, what age group can they be categorized to. Just note down everything & build out your user personas that will pretty much be your guiding light for all your marketing, sales, and operation strategies.

This is particularly important when your content caters to a very specific segment. Once you have a deep understanding of your audiences’ personas, it is much easier to deliver content per their likes and needs.

If you have a platform that’s currently offering content without taking into account your audiences’ needs, it might be a good time to revamp your content strategy.

 

Bad User Experience and Other Technical Aspects

Nothing puts off a loyal subscriber more than a bad user experience. Netflix, Amazon, and other big players have refined and evolved their platforms over the years just to create engaging and better user experiences for their audiences. By adding parental controls, smart downloads, and other features, Netflix has always put the UX at the heart of its ever-changing service.

Basic personalization at a minimum, offering a dynamic experience across multiple devices, catering to your niche, driving viewership, adapting with an evolving market, are some of the key points that one needs to focus on while building their own OTT. There are many SaaS solutions in the market that provide off-the-shelf services so that you don’t need to put money on R&D and reinvent the wheel. They will develop an OTT platform on your behalf.

 

No Subscription Churn Strategy

Subscriber churn has always been a nightmare for OTT platform owners and they need to have an effective strategy to tackle this.

Here are some ways you can reduce your subscriber churn rate

  • Serving content related to the audience
  • Understand why the subscriber is leaving your platform and tackle those issues
  • Constantly strive to offer more value
  • Connect with users
  • Provide offers and incentives
  • Improve customer service and experience

 

Ineffective Use of Data & Insights

Content owners smartly need to analyze consumer behaviors. Identify your audience segmentation and position your content and promotions according to them. Know your customer’s niche and offer what they like. Figure out the pricing sweet spot and offer them the best of what they can afford. Using your data effectively can address many issues and also help you to better serve your customers.

Now that you have understood the reasons why OTT platforms fail, implementing a few or all of the above-mentioned strategies can save you from the nightmare. You could either do all the heavy lifting or simply work alongside trusted OTT service providers like Enveu and focus on creating content.

The growth opportunity in the Online video streaming and OTT industry is vast. The pandemic has had a big positive impact on the entertainment industry, pushing people to stay at home and consume digital content. This trend is here to stay and extend beyond 2021.

Trends forecasted by pundits for 2025 & 2030 are being seen in the industry today! Why wait – it’s the perfect time to get started with building your OTT now!