Many elements are important within an OTT platform that provide a service of choice for the viewer. While content, price, and proper technical functioning (quality of playback, load times, picture quality,...) is a must, each OTT service provider must consider what popular features they are offering to their users.
Over the past decade OTT apps have evolved and became efficient and rather complex systems 'under the hood'. Competition is fierce so adding new features is a necessary and continuous process. Most of the feature trends are dictated by the biggest global OTT services like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook and now new market entrants like Apple TV+ which have the biggest reach and audience. They create viewer's habits which are then expected on other streaming platforms as well.
With this COVID-19 influencing faster growth in OTT consumption than predicted caused growth of churn as well. In conclusion, competition is overwhelming, expectations are set very high so to stay in business your app needs to bring the 'A game' feature-wise as well.
So, what is considered to be important for a quality OTT app. Well, regardless of the number of features offered, and the aforementioned complexity, for the viewer the app needs to be very easy to use. As with any other solution today, less is more. If your users say that the app is so easy to use, you are definitely on the right track. We have already written in previous articles how to achieve this simplicity with UI/UX.
We, at AVIION, developed our 'search' feature almost a decade ago, and were always amazed how this was always pointed out by our clients as something they really like. It seems pretty basic, but it is extremely important to give the viewer ability to access desired content as fast as possible. So, if you have great content, make sure that the users can get to it easy and fast.
As average household has almost 15 different devices connected to internet OTT platform has to be cross-platform solution that will give a viewer a seamless viewing experience. It has simply become an important standard. As one moves around, to and from their home, a good OTT platform will be able to keep up without a glitch. If you want to experience how that looks in practice just get in touch with us. Is it a challenge to create such platform? Most definitely YES, but it is extremely rewarding when you see the end result.
With so many available services, and so much content around it is no wonder that very often we don’t get a chance to consume enough content to justify the cost of the specific service. Offline viewing/ download option is definitely one of the ways that can help with viewer’s decision to stick with a certain service. If they can download the content (encrypted of course) at home on their device and then consume it while commuting or some situation where there is poor signal quality. Also keeps your mobile data plans in check.
Finally, again we have to mention the recommendations within the app. With average viewer being willing to spend 60-90 seconds of scrolling through content your recommendation engine will either keep them engaged or not which can lead to increased churn. As recommendations industry got so developed that there are many companies specializing solely in developing recommendation engine, it is important that your OTT solution is capable of easy integrating with such high-level engines. Obviously with the inclusion of the AI and massive information being gathered about the general audience types of viewing habits collected by the companies like YouTube recommendations are going to get better and better.