Cleeng Blog - Subscription management trends

Unify multiple subscription channels to future-proof OTT success

Written by Adrianna Radzikowska | Aug 8, 2024 8:45:00 PM

Today, OTT viewers consume content on various devices, ranging from mobile apps and connected TVs to traditional pay-TV services. Furthermore, the streaming industry still heavily relies on traditional distribution channels such as pay TV partners and telcos. On the backend side, each of these channels represents its own payment approach and subscription lifecycle management platform for broadcasters. Carefully coordinating these channels on entitlements, pricing, and data levels is necessary to maintain a cohesive streaming business. 

As a broadcaster, this means you need the flexibility to integrate content distribution channels quickly and easily. Without it, how do you stay competitive, respond, and succeed? 

Where do broadcasters struggle with multi-channel subscription management? 

Various content-distribution channels—whether mobile stores, connected TVs, direct carriers, or payment wallets tend to have conflicting logic. 

Each channel has its distinct set of rules, processes, and technical requirements. This makes the backend integration process cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming from a broadcaster's viewpoint. This complexity delays the rollout of new features and hampers the ability to adapt to market changes swiftly, threatening competitiveness. 

Furthermore, with constant data hygiene concerns across different channels, it becomes difficult to understand customers' experiences as a whole and drive strategic business operations primed for success.

Generic subscription management platforms are not designed to meet these unique needs of media and entertainment. Therefore, most OTT broadcasters struggle to address these concerns and use data and platform strategically. This hinders the ability to future-proof the streaming platform despite excellent content. 

In a recent Omdia survey on Driving Streaming Profitability, it was made clear: Broadcasters now value flexible offer management and ease of integration the most in their subscriber management systems. But how exactly do you achieve that?

 

Enter Cleeng’s multichannel billing management - The answer to centralizing and simplifying effortless OTT channel management

Cleeng is an industry-leading name in subscriber management solutions tailored to the OTT industry's unique needs. Our unique API framework allows for effortlessly harmonizing different streaming customer channels depending on your target market. Using it, you can orchestrate the subscription lifecycles from a unified interface. 

This helps you ensure viewers receive seamless experiences across all channels, right from apps and telcos to carrier billings. At the same time, your team gets the flexibility and ease needed to focus on unified strategies everywhere and add or remove channels depending on need. 

 

Here’s how Cleeng’s multi-channel management capabilities help you future-proof streaming: 

  • Greater flexibility and reduced costs

Managing OTT subscriptions through multiple channels hinders the ability to offer flexible pricing options, offers, trial periods, and others cross-promotions. These elements are necessary to ensure competitiveness and growth in a crowded OTT ecosystem. Moreover, as a broadcaster, manually reconciling subscriptions across different channels takes time, effort, and is error-prone. This often leads to revenue loss and customer frustration.

Image: Snapshot of Cleeng’s offer setup to match web offers with offers created in other apps from a unified interface

Cleeng’s pre-built integrations with mobile stores, connected TVs, direct carriers, and payment wallets help overcome these barriers. Using the multi-channel integrations, you can easily offer flexible pricing models and promotional campaigns tailored to your diverse audience segments across demographic groups and geo-locations from a unified dashboard. The presence of automated processes like renewal reminders, billing cycles, and customer support also reduce the need for manual intervention. This minimizes errors and boosts operational efficiency.

Using these capabilities, TOD TV quickly added multiple carriers and partners across its target market. It integrated popular channels like Vodafone, Etisalat, Zain, and OreeDoo in MENA to fuel its growth in the region.

  • No more fragmented user experiences

Providing a consistent and seamless user experience becomes challenging when streaming subscriptions are spread across multiple channels. This inconsistency often leads to customer dissatisfaction and churn. Cleeng’s multichannel billing management integrates and provides a unified view of all subscriber data across all channels. This centralized view allows for the delivery of high-quality content and personalized, consistent user experiences across all channels.

  • Improved visibility and data management

Limited visibility into overall subscription activity makes identifying trends and optimizing offerings challenging. Data fragmentation and inconsistencies often obscure important insights, affecting decision-making processes. This comes in the way of taking proactive steps to predict and prevent churn.


Image: Snapshots of Cleeng’s dashboard showing an overview of subscribers across different channels

Cleeng’s centralized approach to subscription management provides a clear, comprehensive view of the subscriber base. This visibility enables better trend analysis, pricing optimization, and strategic planning. As a result, you can make informed decisions and leverage accurate and consolidated data to drive business growth while enhancing subscriber satisfaction and retention.

 

Want to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure a seamless viewer experience across all channels?

Leverage Cleeng as the strategic subscription management partner for your OTT platform. Benefit from the focus on agility and ease of integration to enjoy flexibility, deliver unified customer experiences, and respond dynamically to market demands. Let our innovation equip you to future proof your business!