Key Considerations for Your IPTV/OTT Business Plan
Video streaming, whether it’s free Lux IPTV, ad-supported, or subscriber-based, is a growing market. According to Digital TV Research, global media revenue from OTT is expected to reach $224 billion in 2027. While SVOD revenues will climb to a whopping $136 billion, AVOD revenues are set to reach $70 billion by 2027.
Table of Contents
Choose the Right IPTV/OTT Solution
Understand Your OTT Costs
Monetize Your OTT Content
Leverage the Power of Analytics and a Recommendation Engine
Today, video streaming can benefit nearly every industry, from entertainment to education, fitness, music, and religion. Platforms such as Disney+ and Paramount+ have taken the OTT market by storm and are perfect examples of how to do it right.
When developing your IPTV/OTT business plan, first consider how you will create, launch, monetize, and differentiate your platform. Choosing the right provider and content delivery network (CDN) is key to launching a successful OTT platform, while monetization and analytics are crucial to growing your user base and revenue.
Choose the Right IPTV/OTT Solution
To deliver a seamless IPTV/OTT experience, there are many moving parts to consider including hardware, software, middleware, transcoding, CDN, security, apps, analytics, and UI/UX. While this can seem overwhelming, OTT providers such as Setplex can provide an all-in-one solution for operators who are looking to start or IPTV Shop upgrade their platform and reach a wider audience.
As an end-to-end OTT solution, Setplex provides all the components needed to deliver a complete IPTV solution, including encoding/transcoding, content and user management, CDN, ad monetization, and analytics. Setplex’s NORA Middleware™, utilizing a microservices-oriented architecture, incorporates all the latest technologies to make Setplex’s platform fault-tolerant and highly scalable. NORA™ is ideal for Tier-one operators that need to support millions of subscribers as well as startups experiencing hyper-growth that require high availability [CS1] to support their OTT/IPTV business operations.
End-to-end IPTV/OTT Solution
Understand Your Costs
It’s important to fully understand each of the company OTT operational costs, which typically include middleware fees, app fees, storage costs, DRM fees, and the largest variable cost – CDN fees.
Content delivery network fees are based on subscriber connection speed and average time watched per day. For example, if an average subscriber watches two hours of video per day at an average connection speed of 3 Mbps, the amount of bandwidth consumed is about 2.575 GB. Over 30 days, that is about 77.25 GB. or .08 TB. At a cost of .02/GB, you can estimate to pay about $1.55 per subscriber monthly in CDN fees.
Beware of OTT companies that offer low middleware or app costs but have CDN charges of .06 /GB, as you will end up paying a lot more at the pump, even if you are not being charged ‘per subscriber’ fees. In this scenario, CDN fees will eat up your profit as your OTT platform becomes more popular.
In order to manage your expenses and revenue, it’s important to choose an IPTV/OTT company who will deliver your content to your audience’s geographic region with a standard rate commitment to minimize costs as your service scales. In general, the more you commit to in terms of TB per month, the lower the cost per TB.
Here at Setplex, we offer a “pay as you grow” model with tiered pricing on video delivery through a major CDN provider. Additionally, we give our customers the option to bring their own CDN.
Monetize Your Content
There are several monetization models to consider. Which is best for your OTT/IPTV business?
AVOD monetization – This model usually works by providing free content along with paid advertisements. YouTube and Hulu’s ad-supported plan are two examples of AVOD monetization.
SVOD monetization – SVOD allows users to access all of the content available on a platform, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, through a monthly or yearly paid subscription.
TVOD monetization – Also known as pay-per-view, users only pay for the content that they access. iTunes, Google Movies, and YouTube Movies use this model to offer music, sporting events, and movies.
HVOD monetization – When two or more of the above OTT business models are combined strategically to create a unique model, it’s termed as Hybrid Video on Demand monetization. YouTube is the perfect example for this category as it combines TVOD, SVOD, and AVOD monetization models on a single platform.
Leverage the Power of Analytics and a Recommendation Engine
As an OTT business, you must continuously offer new, engaging, and personalized content to your subscribers. Analytics can offer valuable insight into user preferences and allows you to tailor content accordingly to reduce churn.
Setplex has collaborated with NPAW, a powerful analytics suite for streaming services, to enable its customers to gauge their UI/UX, optimize marketing, identify streaming quality issues, build their audiences, and improve user retention.
Additionally, Setplex’s recommendation engine utilizes machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize each subscriber’s viewing experience, suggesting content that is specific to the subscriber’s interests and preferences. The functionality incorporates algorithms that learn from subscriber-watching behavior, including content IPTV Store type and categories as well as other metrics such as length and time of views.
The Power of OTT Analytics
OTT Analytics Is Critical to Your Business.
As more providers enter the market, businesses must leverage OTT analytics to produce appealing content tailor-made to retain and expand their user base. To thrive, OTT service providers must offer exciting content, a simple user experience, personalization, and data and technological integration.
In the OTT streaming business, where content is accessed by different users, multiple devices, and internet connections with varying internet speeds, it’s imperative to monitor and analyze the performance of services and OTT data to tailor monetization strategies.
Table of Contents
OTT Analytics Is Critical to Your Business
Streamline Advertising
Centralize Your Insights
Identify and Build Audiences
Improve User Experience
Boost Customer Care
Optimize Marketing
Identify Content That Works
Create Engaging Apps
Improve App Performance
Setplex Answers These Questions and More
OTT analytics can give a 360-degree view of the following factors, and help you:
Streamline Advertising
Advertisements (such as AVOD) help the service Best IPTV Subscription stay profitable. But how can a service provider ensure their ads are performing optimally? OTT analytics offer the service providers an unbiased insight into how the viewers are receiving the ads. Such insights help you schedule, scale, and execute advertisement plans. OTT analytics help you populate ad slots optimally without hurting the UX.
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Centralize Your Insights
Sound video analytics solutions unify Lux IPTV all insights into one platform. A comprehensive OTT analytics platform can help avoid costly correlation engines and data discrepancies. As all departments utilize the same data, you can address silo issues, enabling access to analytics to all to measure performance in real-time, among other parameters. Also, using a single solution is cheaper than building and maintaining multiple technologies.
Identify and Build Audiences
Streaming strategy depends on usage patterns. Understanding the stay duration of users is key to perfecting the content strategy. A robust analytics solution helps you prioritize resources to fulfill user needs. For example, a smartphone may not be as data-guzzling as a smart TV. Analytics equips you to allocate resources by assessing your audience’s preferred device.
OTT analytics offer insights into audience preferences, which helps service providers create user segments based on smart data. Using OTT analytics, service providers can scale quality and deliver the experience audiences demand. For instance, service providers can separate users deemed valuable (premium) and offer them customized or higher levels of service. Service providers can also categorize users based on their device, location, or network quality.
Improve User Experience
The main reason behind users leaving a platform is a poor user experience. You can retain your user base by addressing protracted buffering, crashes, and bitrate loss, among other issues.
Boost Customer Care
Posting trained personnel to address customer queries can improve user experience. Customer care executives must have access to analytics to address customer issues without fumbling for a response. Tracing the root cause of a customer’s complaint becomes easy with insight into video analytics. Quick resolution promotes greater customer satisfaction and ensures higher retention, impacting the bottom line positively.
Optimize Marketing
Video streaming analytics can help you spot viewers likely to leave and take preventive measures. Analytics can guide you toward creating optimized content and channeling your marketing efforts by segmenting your clients based on their level of engagement and experience expectations.
Identify Content That Works
Pinpointing the correct content and avoiding wasting money on unappealing content is crucial to your success. Ascertaining your audience’s taste is critical when brainstorming for content strategy. It helps you determine the genres to tap into and the delivery mechanism to adopt (for example whether to release episodes or entire seasons). Understanding language preferences and where viewers leave during an episode are also necessary.
Launch your OTT/IPTV Platform
Create Engaging Apps
Understanding the way users navigate the sections and features of your OTT app – before and after watching a video – offers deep insights into usability. Analyzing the platform’s health, including its stability and problems, is key to ensuring its availability. Combining in-app analytics with video streaming analytics helps streaming companies track and enhance experience.
Improve App Performance
A solid analytics solution analyzes videos across locations and devices to offer you actionable insight. Such meaningful insight does away with speculations and offers you critical data on your app stability and rendering quality. Armed with such data, you can finetune your app’s performance.
Setplex Answers These Questions and More
Data analytics is key to thriving in the competitive OTT space. Service providers must compile and analyze data in real-time to draw meaningful conclusions regarding their users’ preferences to tailor quality and content accordingly.
Setplex collaborates with NPAW, a powerful analytics suite for streaming services. Service providers can leverage the state-of-the-art NPAW Suite to gauge UX, using metrics like the stay duration of users, the content they stream, the devices they use, and the streaming quality they require. NPAW’s solutions help providers monitor the health of their platform, pinpoint issues, and resolve them before they affect UX. Such deep Lux IPTV analytics pave the path for user retention (reduced churn) and a steady stream of revenue.
