This blog post by Paul Pastor, Chief Business Officer at Quickplay, outlines some of the key challenges currently facing buyers of Tier 1 technology in the streaming industry.
With 95% of American households now having at least one streaming subscription, providers face new challenges in a nearly saturated market.
Meanwhile, large, well-funded companies with strong brand recognition (what we call Tier 0 providers) are making bold strategies to gain market share. Meanwhile, Tier 1 players with deep regional and industry roots are punching above their weight by offering differentiated content and services.
Tier 1 content distributors face unique challenges when competing against large providers. At Mobile World Congress, Quickplay met with many Tier 1 services to understand their challenges and opportunities. Here are some of the most common concerns we hear from businesses and our thoughts on how to address them with long-term growth and flexibility in mind.
1. Helping consumers navigate the streaming world
One of the biggest challenges for distributors is making their content discoverable in an increasingly complex ecosystem.
Evan Shapiro reports that Gen Z's top four priorities for streaming services are relevant content, original content, refresh rate, and library size. While it's easy to interpret this as a sign to invest in more content, there are many benefits for distributors just by making their content more discoverable.
At the end of the day, consumers want something that looks and feels like Netflix: reliable and easy to navigate. They want to find the shows they want to watch and discover new shows that appeal to their interests with personalized recommendations and insights.
Netflix sets the bar high for ease of use, but few services live up to it. You can download Netflix shows via hotspot and watch them on your iPad during your flight, but you may have a hard time downloading other apps.
There is also an opportunity here for “super aggregators” to gain market share through high-quality experiences that make it easier for people to discover and consume content. please think about it. Content from a variety of partners and providers is brought together in one place for easy discovery and access. For MVPDs and carriers/carriers, this “co-competition” business model provides a clear value proposition for integrating separate libraries. Additionally, new LLM models driven through the AI Marketplace will allow operators to add non-standard metadata to drive even better search capabilities.
The key to meeting this challenge is to act quickly and have the right technology in place to demonstrate relevance to consumers.
2. Make the right bets on technology
“We constantly hear Tier 1 technology buyers expressing concerns about choosing the wrong platform. And nearly all RFPs are developed around an understanding of the current market and vendors Ask if you have a specific feature set that is seen in the market today. The challenge is that today's feature set is not tomorrow's feature set.
Choosing the right platform starts with understanding where you want to be in the future, not where you are now. Then ask how the vendor will build, design, and help you respond to market changes in the future.
As long as you have an open, modular platform, keeping up the pace doesn't mean replacing it completely. This architectural principle allows you to extend and/or replace a set of microservices to quickly adapt your platform to new consumer needs.
Particularly for Tier 1 providers, control is something they cannot afford to lose. Multi-tenant SaaS solutions reduce time to market and limit customization such as integration with existing systems and development/extension of new features. Dedicated instances give you control over your product roadmap and ensure that when your CEO, board member, or GM comes to visit with important new feature requests, you can respond to them instead of spending months negotiating with a multi-tenant vendor. guaranteed to take days or sprint cycles to deliver. .
3. Guide AI to the most valuable problems
The hype around artificial intelligence has some distributors worried that they are not keeping up, but the range of possibilities is so vast that it can be difficult to focus on use cases. .
One example of the potential of generative AI is Google Cloud and Cineverse's partnership to increase discoverability. Cineverse built a chatbot to recommend movies using the Google PaLM large-scale language model. Users can talk to the bot and get suggestions about what to watch based on their viewing history and metadata such as location, date, and local weather conditions.
In general, I think discoverability is one of the most attractive use cases for AI in OTT. Discoverability depends on metadata. This means we know enough about our consumers and our content to make recommendations that keep them coming back to our services.
AI can be used to improve discoverability by adding data to an asset that is not available in the normal metadata set (for example, Cineverse uses someone's location, date, and weather to recommend the perfect movie). etc.). TikTok has proven the power of AI to drive engagement through content recommendations, and now Cineverse and Google are taking a similar approach to streaming content.
There are also many interesting possibilities when it comes to maximizing yield.
Providers must decide what they are trying to optimize for, such as promotion, engagement, and monetization. (Or all three!) New advanced AI models will allow streaming companies to operate as if they were replicating the best programmers on staff, maximizing the long-term revenue potential of a given consumer. Helpful.
No matter what, you need to test and deploy AI-based tools quickly and effectively. To take full advantage of new generative AI technologies, you need a cloud-native, API-driven platform to plug them into.
The most important thing is to leap
According to market research, Tier 1 technology buyers' concerns boil down to three main factors: control, flexibility, and speed. Buyers are torn between the desire to invest in technology to meet market demand and the risk of purchasing a platform that doesn't give them the ownership or agility they need to grow.
After all, not moving is riskier than being stationary, so the first step is getting the right technology.
Content distributors need to choose technology that prepares them for the future: a platform with an open, extensible architecture built by companies who want to help them become leaders in this fast-moving market. there is. Look for vendors who speak your language and want to partner with you to move the industry forward.
Written by Pastor Paul.
