Way To Launch Your Own OTT Video Platform

OTT platform service refers to movies and TV shows that are delivered to users without the need for a satellite television subscription. OTT streaming platform content can also be directly downloaded and viewed on users’ demand. And OTT is widely acknowledged as a trending technology across the world. Here, in this article, we have covered how OTT content can be delivered and the different ways by which you can launch your own OTT video platform.

If you are wondering how to make an OTT platform or how to launch an OTT platform, we have got you covered.

How is OTT Content Delivered?

OTT content includes movies and TV shows that are directly delivered over the internet to multiple devices like PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

How is OTT Video Software Content Delivered?

Since OTT software is designed to be accessible across multiple devices, viewers access it over a variety of devices. The most common devices used by viewers to watch OTT content are mentioned below.

Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are at the core of OTT solutions as viewers prefer watching content on their mobile phones and tablets. And moreover, with data prices dropping, the number of mobile users keeps increasing.

Personal Computers

When it comes to building custom OTT platforms, next to mobile phones and tablets, PCs are popular among viewers. OTT websites on browsers and desktop-based apps keep growing among PC users.

Smart TVs

Smart TV sales keep skyrocketing like never before. And one of the main reasons behind this is the increasing popularity of OTT. With smart TV Apps, live TV, and OTT streaming, more viewers will opt for OTT in the near future.

Digital Media Players

Next to Smart TVs, gaming consoles like Xbox and PS4 are preferred for OTT streaming as they support the Over The Top platform in a very accommodating manner.

Things to Consider Before Launching an OTT Platform

If you consider starting an OTT video platform, you have to consider the prerequisites that should be in place in order to increase the chances of success.

Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is the foremost step when you want to start with OTT streaming. It is important to know where your market is if you want real results. Presenting quality content to an irrelevant audience will not bring the results you prefer.

Netflix and Amazon Prime target a wide audience by offering a variety of genres and languages. And TV channel sites and apps cater to their existing audiences, including regional-level audiences.

Content Licensing and Acquisition

If you plan on creating content, begin by finding out how to put together the best team at the optimal budget. If you want to license shows and movies or if you want to buy exclusive rights, then you need the budget to overcome your competitors. You can properly execute this only when you have the target audiences’ interests in mind.

Building a Platform to Meet Market Requirements

When you build a platform, you will have to consider the features you have to include, the resources you will need to develop the website or app, hosting, customer service, etc. An OTT app builder can help you to build your OTT app effectively.

Pricing the Content

You have to estimate the pricing in a way that it covers the costs of running your OTT video business while also making it affordable and reasonable to your customers. You will also have to consider the competition in the market and come up with a pricing that balances every aspect of your business, making it economical for your customers.

How To Start OTT Platform

Create Your OTT Video Platform

OTT platform development is complicated but you can achieve perfection by using the right combination of strategies, and with professional assistance. Following are the essential steps to build your platform for OTT service.

Do your research and develop a comprehensive streaming business plan that focuses on developing a product that serves the customers. Make sure you have all the information included in the plan in order to build an effective OTT platform.

Choose Your Business Model

Begin your OTT platform with clearly set objectives and a clear roadmap for your OTT platform. To become a successful OTT streaming provider you must have a deep understanding of your business model. This helps you to determine your needs and what resources you would need to build and how it should function.

Your OTT video revenue model should be derived from your content strategy. For example, if you plan to offer a subscription, you have to develop a payment gateway to collect payments from your subscribers. Allow access to a wide range of payment methods like credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, etc to make your platform more customer-friendly. You should also consider video monetization models like advertising and pay-per-view (PPV).

Streaming Niche Selection

In order to build a profitable OTT platform, determine your target audience and begin developing content that is relevant to your target audience. That way your content becomes appealing to them. This should be your priority if you want to build a world-class OTT platform.

Niche selection is a crucial step in content marketing. When you do things according to your niche, you can focus on writing a script that is valuable and deeply appreciated by your target audience. Based on your target audience, can be anything from sports to comedy or drama.

Attractive Content Inventory

High-quality content is the key. And delivering content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience alone can do the trick. This is applicable to both video content and any written descriptions that go with it. Since OTT platforms are subscription-based (SVOD), it is also essential to offer a wide variety of content that your audience can watch.

Build a content inventory that includes both live and on-demand content. This will pique the interest of the viewers to watch content as it airs the previous episodes at their convenience.

Get Your Mobile App Developed

The next major step in building your OTT platform is mobile app development. As more and more viewers consume content on mobile devices, it is important to make your app compatible with mobile phones and tablets. Mobile devices are now predominantly used more than television, today. And with mobile being the new smart tv, your OTT app must be of a world-class standard to go along with the mobile configuration. So consider developing an Android and iOS app as you plan to develop the OTT platform. It is very important to ensure your app enables support by multiple devices in order to reach a wide audience.

Moreover, make sure that your mobile app is intuitive and user-friendly and is able to stream video content without any buffering. It should also have an easy-to-use interface and streaming functionality.

Leverage Analytics

Tracking and analyzing user behavior is important to achieve an optimized user experience and high user engagement on your OTT apps. You can get this done by including analytics tools like google or Microsoft Analytics. Tools like these give valuable insights into how users engage with your OTT streaming channel. You can keep your platform updated by making the necessary changes to improve the user experience.

You can track the number of users, app crashes, user engagement like page views, and most watched content. You can clearly understand the user behavior from these tools. And you can use this data to improve the quality of your streaming service.

Use Multi-CDN Strategy

A content delivery network (CDN) enables high-speed and low latent content delivery to users. Start out your OTT platform with a multi-CDN strategy, which will ensure that your content will be delivered on time. A single CDN server is not to be preferred as it can cause high latency during live streaming due to a high traffic overload at peak times.

Whereas a multi-CDN strategy will help you tackle this problem by delivering content quickly and efficiently even when there is a high demand and a traffic overload.

Secure Your Content

Privacy and security are essential factors that must be focused on throughout the development of your OTT platform. During streaming your content, you have to make sure that your content is encrypted and secure. This step is essential to prevent your content from being pirated or stolen.

You can use digital rights management (DRM) to secure your content. DRM technologies enable encryption of your content to prevent any form of unauthorized access. This helps secure your content and ensure it remains accessible only to authorized users who have legal access to it.

Conclusion:

An OTT platform can give you what you need most – it can take you to a larger audience in a relatively less amount of time. Also, it helps you gain more revenue, quickly, when it is done the right way. That is why you will need an OTT platform development company with a turn-key solution like VPlayed that helps you in building your perfect OTT platform, making a complex and challenging task, simplified with professional assistance. It offers you assistance with mobile app development, analytics, content delivery, security, and much more. Start your own OTT platform today with VPlayed and build a feature-rich OTT platform without the hassle of coding.