Video streaming is constantly evolving. The predictions show the potential that this market can reach. But if many people decide to rush into the OTT or streaming platforms business, only some will succeed.
Today, launching an online video platform is easy, thanks to tools like OKAST. But to ensure its success, 4 challenges are important to take into account:
1/ Provide a modern, robust and easy-to-use platform for your viewers
2/ Offering attractive video content
3/ Implement effective customer acquisition strategies
4/ Use the power of data and artificial intelligence
Let’s look at these different elements in detail.
1. Provide a modern, robust and easy-to-use platform for your viewers
The first factor is the biggest challenge: launching a powerful branded streaming platform. That’s the magic of OKAST, we allow you to create customized turnkey video streaming services in a click. Wait this is not a fake punchline: OKAST is REALLY an all-in-one solution and meets all needs: storage, hosting, encoding, storefront, streaming, payment solution, video player, transactional emails, mobile applications etc….
No coding necessary: you don’t need any developers, engineers or webmasters to integrate APIs or code. Like Wix or WordPress for Website, our solutions generate a ready-to-use streaming video platform that you can fully customize.
The modernity and ease of use for your future users is what made Netflix so successful. We have therefore made a special effort to offer video platforms that meet its requirements. Take a look at our demo platform if you want to judge for yourself. Our designs are inspired by what people use and know and that makes all the difference. Our “picture in picture” feature, for example, ensures that your subscribers can browse without interrupting content playback.
Two additional points you need to know:
- On the pricing side: you can launch your platform from 29€/month. This cost is to be seen in the light of an in-house development with an agency or with a team of developers, which could cost you several tens of thousands of euros
- On the time-to-market side: the faster you can launch a video streaming platform the more successful it will be. Well, fine! With OKAST you can launch your service in less than a few days!
With more than 80 platforms operating worldwide, OKAST is recognized among online video platforms (OVPs) for the quality of its services. Of course support and maintenance are included in the turnkey video offer. So you won’t have to worry about all these technical aspects.
OKAST provides a flexible solution with multiple options that allow you to generate revenue from day one. With features like our encoding and transcoding farm, picture-in-picture, multilingual mode, multi-currency, recommendation engine and many monetization options, you no longer have any excuse not to offer a premium platform to your audience.
2. Offer attractive video content
The second challenge for a successful video platform is the sourcing of awesome video content. If you create content such as training, courses or expertise, you certainly already have enough to feed a platform with your own video productions. However, if you want to offer entertainment content such as movies or series, not everyone has the rights to license a catalogue of movies like Disney or the budget to produce series like Netflix.
You can always try to contact the rights holders (production or distribution companies, or directly artists/creators) but it may take time to negotiate a license agreement. Choose large catalogs to avoid multipling rights agreements. Focus on rare and exclusive content to diversify from the competition. Finally, when negotiating with potential rights holders, keep in mind that for a multitude of reasons, a lot of content is not currently being exploited digitally and is “sleeping” on servers or hard disks. So better be seen and monetized on a legal streaming platform, right?
If you do not produce video content or do not own the rights to distribute premium content (films, series, animation, documentaries, web-series, etc.), other solutions exist, such as marketplaces, which allow audiovisual rights holders to offer exploitation licenses on very specific terms.
Technologies such as blockchain are revolutionizing the exchange and distribution of rights through a decentralized and fully secure system. In addition, this type of system will allow automatic and transparent royalties payments. New solutions like ikast.io will offer this kind of service, so stay tuned, we will tell you more about it very soon.
3. Implement effective customer acquisition strategies
The third challenge facing a video entrepreneur who wants to launch his streaming platform is obviously the recruitment of a qualified audience. How to find and retain viewers for your platform and then convert them into paying customers? This is a key issue that is often neglected in OTT platform projects. Everyone talks about the success of Netflix, but it should not be forgotten that they spend 2 billion euros on advertising every year. Without aspiring to become Netflix, a promotional budget must be anticipated and provisioned. For niche video platforms that are starting out, you have to be smart and find, for example, growth hacking techniques to develop your video business. In this blog we regularly give you marketing tips to promote your video platform and develop your traffic, it would be difficult to summarize everything in a few lines, but keep in mind some great principles:
- Audience analysis: Before implementing any strategy, it is important to understand who your audience is. You have to do research to analyze your target group: gender, age, socio-professional category, where are they online (what media, what social networks), what are their interests etc…. You also have to be able to segment this audience, to better address them: who are hardcore fans vs the curious? Are they interested in all categories/topics or very specialized (in a niche of a niche etc…). For that there are many tools, we were talking HERE about Facebook Audience Tool for example, but there are more powerful ones, which use big data techniques like FlameFy for example.
- Customer data: the key to Netflix success is the knowledge of their audience and the extreme personalization they are offering to their subscribers. Big data tools make it possible to collect a lot of data and process it smartly to set up automated acquisition strategies. This is what our FlameFy tool does, for example, by interacting on Twitter with a qualified target audience, and by customizing a message to the relevant audience segment.
- Distribution: a third aspect to increase your video platform growth and visibility is the distribution of your video platform. The more you make it available on different media and devices, the more visibility you will get. For example, at OKAST we allow you to create IOS, Android or Amazon Fire TV applications! We also enable you to distribute your platforms to institutions (universities, libraries…) or in B-to-B via an automatic log-in system. Find partnerships with cable operators, media, influencers to distribute your streaming service as widely as possible and hack the distribution !
To go further, contact us as we also do marketing agency consulting to help our customers grow!
4. Using the power of data and artificial intelligence
Netflix has become what it is today thanks to its very precise recommendation and customization system. It is important to ensure a perfect user experience to engage and retain your audience on your video streaming service. This involves suggesting the right content to the right person based on their tastes and viewing preferences. At OKAST, we offer an algorithmic recommendation widget that allows you to recommend similar content to your viewers. This option is available as an option on your platform.
The next step is to integrate artificial intelligence into your platform, such as “machine learning”, which allows a video platform to offer content adapted to each viewer according to their declared tastes, viewing histories and searches. This algorithm has the particularity of learning and improving. If, for example, the suggestions made are not effective, it will adapt and adjust to provide the right video content to the right viewer.
Offering recommendation systems is not just a gadget but a real added value for your VOD or SVOD platform.
Do you want to launch your own video platform? Start today with OKAST and benefit from our 30-day money back guarantee.