OTT has become a buzzword in online and entertainment world during the past year. Due to its quick market surge, it is no wonder that many live broadcasters and video publishers want to jump on the OTT bandwagon (choo-choo!). According to a recent Juniper Research report, the OTT market is expected to reach $32 billion in revenue by 2019. However a fully-featured and flexible OTT solution can be costly, so knowing the key challenges in advance can ease the pain for the ambitious live publishers.
In this post, we'll lay down our top 5 challenges and back them up with some cool charts deriving from survey findings.
People simply adore live entertainment. From the supply side, streaming live has numerous challenges, and managing an online live event can be handful especially for events with large audiences. Pay-per-view as the most-direct revenue model is gaining in popularity and signals the ad-hoc nature of video demand out there. But, we can't ignore the fact that content rapidly loses from its value ever since a live broadcast ends. That's why investing in live streaming technology is a must and top priority for broadcasters, as the graph below shows.
As technology advances, the bar of expected quality of delivery is set really high and live broadcasters are expanding their scope towards "quality of experience" instead of "quality of content".
As a live video publisher, you want to get the most out of your wonderful content. In the same time, you want to be as flexible as possible while designing your offering. To be able to quickly repurpose your live content and archive it for future consumption can be a competitive advantage for the top broadcasters. Even that the value of content shrinks over time, replays in the form of video-on-demand are a powerful product for audiences who missed the live stream. Services enabling video clippings (made immediately after the original broadcast) is a new way for extending video longevity and it has proven its value, especially in sports.
One of the biggest challenges for live online broadcasters is to exploit all the available channels used by their audiences and use their growth effects in their favor.
Active participation in an ever expanding list of mobile, social & web platforms ask lot of skill and knowledge, as well as a defined strategic approach. Live streaming apps and social media channels can be a great growth engine for the proactive broadcasters, as new initiatives towards integration are becoming a regular practice (like this recent Twitter move).
Handling all these challenges could take a lot of resources. Reaching the right balance between these investments and the returns (ROI) is the master challenge. Anyway, precisely detecting the potential gaps and analyzing their effects is a good starting point for your long-term strategy.
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