In the age of Netflix, the online audience is constantly looking for on-demand videos. For content owners, launching their video streaming service has become a necessity from a good-to-have functionality. If you are a content owner with a rich video library and have a plan for launching your OTT Platform, building it from scratch is not a great idea when there are actually other brilliant options out there.
You can create your own OTT and Live Streaming Platform using customizable white label solutions, and launch and manage your OTT apps. While choosing the right white-label OTT platform, it is essential to choose the one that aligns with your business goals and needs as the website is going to be the base for everything. Let’s explore the components and essential features to launch your own OTT platform in the highly competitive US market.
Categories of OTT Services
At a high level, we can distinguish two broad categories of premium OTT services and envision a distinct set of industry contributors delivering each category of services.
Mass-Market Services
Mass-market services focus general film and TV entertainment content typically targeting mainstream audiences. As the market expands, the major premium OTT aggregators like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu will be undergoing increased competition from various incumbents. Major studio broadcasters like HBO now, Sling Television, etc. and media platform providers like Sony PlayStation, are diversifying into subscription services.
Niche Services
A wide range of niche OTT services are gaining traction across the US market targeting well-defined fan bases and audience segments offering access to the content that is hard to find. Categories of providers include independent aggregators, sports bodies, right holders, and even studio broadcasters with access to unique libraries of film, content, and other niche offerings.
Things to Consider Before Launching OTT Platform
The idea to build your own OTT business is a wise decision during this time where viewership is moving online. Here are some elements that go into a successful blueprint to build your own OTT business.
Define Your Market
This may sound obvious, but it’s critical to set the base for some successful OTT offerings. You must understand who you want to offer content, what your audience is interested in, what they don’t like along with when and where they like to enjoy different forms of content. Even if you already own a large amount of content, careful research to analyze your target audience is essential.
Content Licensing and Acquisition
This is the soul of your business. You must master some excellent negotiation tactics to get the best content for your money if you are sourcing content from somewhere.
You will have to refer to the information you have gathered about your target demographic to select the right pieces of content that viewers will value. Most importantly, you will have to know what blend of local and regional content you plan to offer, how to get hands-on premium content, and how to accommodate exclusive rights for content that drive viewer engagement.
Building a Platform to Meet Market Requirements
When it comes to launching your OTT Platform, you can build a video platform internally, integrate, and adapt a current platform for your new market and business, or use a third-party platform that meets your needs. If you want to build a platform from scratch, or adapting an existing on internally, make sure to consider the number of internal resources you will have to allocate for an undertaking.
How to Pack Your Content?
You will need a cohesive plan to promote your handpicked video library. You have spent the time creating or sourcing the content you feel is the most relevant to your target audience. Now you need an efficient way to bundle your content, and figure out the right plan for emerging channels to promote and distribute special types of content. Besides, your content packaging must go together with your pricing strategy.
Pricing Your Content
You cannot simply choose a random price for your content you think that resonates with your market. It must be based on the scientific research you have gathered. To price your content, the best way, analyze what your competitors are charging for similar content, how many competitors are in the same market, the quality of the content and services you get, what is the cost to acquire your library of content, etc.
Packaging and pricing your content must go in alignment with the revenue model you choose. The market size and the number of subscribers and viewers you attract will give you an idea of what type of advertisers you can attract.
Market Your Content
Marketing your OTT service may seem unnecessary, but is critical to building a strong brand identity. If you want to create your OTT platform, you must include marketing as an essential competitor to launch your OTT service. Marketing is one of the crucial pieces for a successful launch. If you build it, you must market it as well. Positioning your service in the market by highlighting key differentiators, narrating your brand story, and stating how unique it is from your competitors will resonate in the minds of your targeted demographic and will grow your subscriber base.
Leveraging Your Demographics
If you have been planning to build a platform, source content, create a dynamic marketing plan and have everything in place, then it’s time to iterate. Utilizing the knowledge you have gathered in demographic research will help you further to define your market and create benchmarks for future performance.
The use of analytical along with the basic information you pull from the viewer’s engagement will help you direct the next steps. It will also allow you to target the experience of each audience. You can integrate your brand story in sync with the everyday behavior of a viewer so that they will turn to your service first. The right data analysis will set you ahead of the competition.
The Rise of OTT Platform- The Real Benefits
Out of the major benefits of OTT, the most significant one is its potential ability to engage with a younger and larger online media-consuming population than you could engage through traditional TV broadcasts. Here are some of the other benefits of OTT services.
OTT Viewing Experience Over the Traditional Cable TV
Video-on-demand has transformed the way of experiencing video content over the internet. The OTT platform contributes to revolutionize the way we watch TV. The popular OTT platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu as taken the viewing experience through high speed streaming content and access to their preferred channel online.
OTT Leverages Businesses and Enterprises
The trend of the OTT is also expanding its reach to enterprises and facilitating them to communicate with each other for an affordable cost and sometimes at no cost. OTT services play a critical role in holding businesses and enterprise-level apps. Also, they offer some exclusive features that attract viewers and flexibly to accentuate business growth.
Data Transparency and Micro-Targeting
While traditional TV consumption metrics were based on larger sample size and interpreted data, OTT advertising is more transparent regarding who is watching the delivered content. Not only the OTT service providers can know who is watching, along with other valid data but also know what they are watching when they are watching, and on what device they are watching. This gives the ability to target your ads very specifically to garner the highest rates of return.
Further, viewers like the ability to choose and feel to have more control or their media consumption including the ads they view. Most OTT media companies offer the ability for viewers to choose between potential ads during an upcoming content break. This not only leads to a better sense of engagement by the audience but also allows your message to reach them better.
Augmenting Over Sports and Education
Sports and educational industries are the major ones benefiting from a niche OTT platform. The wider distribution of dedicated broadcasting of sports with Pay TV, streaming of rich live content is made simple and more user-friendly. Launching your own live streaming platform that focuses on educational content rather than entertainment amplifies the online connection of students and teachers to leverage online educational activities.
Cloud Hosting
Most of the OTT platform providers are using Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud services as their premier cloud storage component. The cloud-based solution helps businesses in launching the OTT platform to extend the scalability and consumer engagement to magnify the business revenue. Some solutions also come with integrated CDN which offers great performance on a real-time basis.
The Powerful Technologies Behind the Success of OTT Platforms
With more people choosing for OTT services over TV packages, televisions have evolved into OTT services to reach the audience where they are. Have you ever wondered how OTT services deliver such a flawless user experience to the audience? The credit goes to advanced technologies that power services like Netflix. When you create your OTT platform, there are some essential technologies to include in your OTT platform for your business.
Hosting
Hosting is one of the major factors in deciding the success nature of any OTT video platform. Before building your own OTT business, the importance of hosting is a major factor whether you tend to depend on self-hosting or any other ways. The plan of hosting will affect the difficulty of deployment, where cloud hosting will be more straightforward and self-hosting requires adequate skills and dimension levels.
Multiple CDN
Choosing CDN is another essential factor that delivers the right content at the right time to the right type of audience. It’s not that all the CDN support all the streaming choices; choosing the right multiple CDN support balances the user loads to reach every geographical audience.
Streaming Protocol
To stream the content live while launching your OTT platform, you must include multiple streaming protocols for video delivery like real-time streaming protocol (RTSP), real-time protocol (RTP), etc. While RTSP is used to stream live content, RTP transports media data that is negotiated over RTSP.
Transcoder
Choosing the right encoder is important in offering multiple file formats that are compatible with all platforms and players. Ensuring a better positive user experience is vitally important after successfully building your own OTT business.
Cross-Platform Support
Offering access to the platform on various mediums like Laptops, Smartphones, Tablets, connected TVs, etc. helps initiate and performing the playback at any time, and anywhere.
Core Features to Include in Your OTT Platform
An OTT platform that powers your video streaming service must have a myriad of features essential to help you launch, manage, monetize, and grow your video streaming service. These are some core features you must look into an OTT streaming solution before choosing one-
Content Management System
A CMS is the most important feature you need to look for in an OTT solution that can help you with all aspects of video content management like importing, managing, and curating content. A good CMS helps to upload and to manage data easily by saving time. It must also offer the option to connect your platform with social media accounts and automatically distribute videos to the properties owned and operated by you through a simple dashboard. The platform must also offer the flexibility to set your own content rules that will allow or deny playback of your videos by geography.
Build and Publish the OTT App
If the platform you choose just offers an API, you have a herculean task ahead to custom develop the apps across all the platforms you want to reach. Instead, look for a platform that has ready-to-use templates and options to customize and adapt your own theme to speed up the time to market. You will end up saving a lot of time and money on developing complicated OTT apps.
Monetization
Source: vdocipher.com
You want to build your own OTT business, but how do you want to monetize your content? Your OTT platform must support whatever revenue model you choose. For example, if you plan to offer ad-supported VOD, your platform must have an inbuilt ad-server to manage, prioritize, and set up campaigns.
It must also support all ad formats like videos, banners, native, overlay, etc. In short, you must choose a solution that supports all monetization models such as subscription on-demand (SVOD), transaction-on-demand (TVOD), advertisement on-demand (AVOD), or even hybrid model to ensure you get the adequate flexibility within the platform as your business expands. Ask about the monetization models as supported on the platform, how easy it is to set up the ads yourself, whether it supports hybrid monetization model etc.
Reports
Analytics is a crucial part when it comes to managing your OTT platform. If you are looking for different answers about how to launch your OTT platform, look for a solution that gives you metrics around multiple areas including video engagement like total playback, viewer demographics, average playback, device info, etc.
Other metrics include total revenue earned, the total number of subscribers, content performance, consumer engagement, etc. Potentially the platform must give you the essential insights to drive key business decisions.
User Management
User management is a necessity for any OTT platform, it must have the admin setup to control user access, on-board/off-board users, subscription management, set/reset the password, update the email address of users, set up rules, and a lot more. If you consider the user’s perspective, the key is to manage multiple profiles under a single account, offline viewing, viewing history, etc.
Video Interface and User Engagement
How your viewers engage with your OTT platform? This is an important aspect of controlling the user experience when launching your OTT platform. While delivering media content, the most important rule in interface design to abide by is – don’t make your viewers think too much.
For example, Netflix allows users to consume what they want, how they want, and whenever they want. There is no form of interruptions like advertisements in between or any time restrictions. This is where Netflix went one-step ahead of traditional cable services. They created originals and allowed viewers to binge-watch entire seasons and without any ads, that too for an affordable monthly fee.
IT Infrastructure
When it comes to IT infrastructure, cloud hosting, security, CDN, storage, built-in marketing tools, customization, support, and social sharing are some of the aspects to consider. Compared to traditional servers, cloud servers are much more reliable and ensure the OTT platform relies on a powerful cloud-based IT infrastructure to offer the necessary servers and storage required to run your streaming service.
Users, at the same time without any latency issue and must scale up its rising demand. Additionally, look for a platform that offers security options like digital rights management (DRM), and encryption are the most common security system that plays a crucial role in protecting the content from unauthorized access to the content and copyrights.
Another important factor to consider is the CDN, which is essential for uninterrupted video streaming. The best CDN offers great performance on a real-time basis and must be highly efficient to aid you in giving the right user experience. Look for an OTT and Live Streaming Platform that comes integrated with CDN; it might be a good idea to gauge the platform’s bandwidth capable before choosing one.
Built-in Marketing Tools
Built-in tools for marketing helps to build enduring value for your OTT website and apps. If it’s optimized for SEO, it helps you score higher in search engines and the rank sustains over time. A platform with this tool is always a value-added choice.
Subtitle and Caption Support
In the United States, the laws require closes captions for some video content. In the US, section 508 is the law-governing closed caption requirements. For online video, live content that is simultaneously broadcasted on TV is legally required to include subtitles and captions.
Especially in the educational niche, captions are becoming a legal standard as well. So how to integrated closed captions to your OTT content. First, you must ensure that your platform supports closed captions.
Customization
If you are learning about how to launch your OTT platform, it is recommended to evolve and adapt quickly as your changing requirements need a platform with flexibility. The ability to customize and quickly build the extensions is important to add a customized feature with ease.
Security and Anti-Piracy
After launching your OTT Platform, how are you going to protect your content from piracy issues? Distributors in the United States alone have lost over $9 billion in revenue a couple of years back due to piracy issues. By 2022, the number is expected to rise by almost 30%. To offer high security and protect your video content from piracy threats, there are several legitimate options available in the market like encrypted video streaming, digital rights management, dynamic watermarking, password protection, etc. Securing your videos from illegitimate video downloaders online can be the most significant task once you start proprietary content.
Availability Across All Devices
Viewers expect a quality broadcast experience across all devices during any time of the day. However, how do you ensure your OTT content is accessible across multiple devices at the same time? To be able to offer a seamless user experience, your OTT platform must be able to recognize the devices that make the request and must be able to stream content accordingly. This involves keeping a copy of every video in different formats of different devices and screen sizes.
Support
As your OTT business grows, you need user support from your OTT solution provider in all factors like training, troubleshooting, maintenance, and upgrading. Most importantly, the response has to be instant and must be able to reach out to them via all mediums. Choose a solution that offers constant support and regularly updated via your preferred medium of communication.
Conclusion
The success of your OTT lies in the customization of your OTT platform according to your business needs. Building an OTT platform and establishing yourself in the competitive US market isn’t an easy task, but at the same time, it doesn’t need to be complicated, as well.
As the OTT market is evolving and expanding, you need a reliable partner to create your OTT platform. It all depends on the right strategy and business value to capture the OTT market.
Putting together an OTT service is only a small part of the story. Scaling, engaging, and supporting the platform as you grow is equally an important, time-consuming, and expensive task. If you are a content creator or have a rich sourced content, it is best to leverage a white-label OTT platform for your streaming service and focus on making and engaging great content.
Managing our OTT service becomes easy as you can use a single platform to manage all your content, ads, payments, etc. The best platform allows you to have full content over your videos, monetization strategy and lets you keep 100% of your revenue. Choosing the right partners can reduce your workload and offer you the time to focus on other aspects of your business. Learn more about launching your own secure OTT platform by reaching out to us.
Live video streaming isn’t new, but thanks to apps like Periscope, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, you no longer need a complicated stack of technologies to access it for day-to-day life. A smartphone and a good internet connection is all you need to stream a live video feed on these social media platforms.
However, video streaming is not just a fun activity; it has a plethora of potentials from a business point of view, too. The sphere of video streaming is evolving with each day marking something new and unique. Whether it is social media, live product launch events, or live streaming of music concerts, we have seen an array of applications until now. So what’s the next big thing in the live streaming industry?
It has to be sports!
The MO of attending live sports events has changed dramatically over the recent few years, and with the advent of online sports streaming, it is just a matter of few clicks to get instant access to live sports events. Similar to in-stadium experiences, event organizers are devising dedicated strategies for engaging fans on live-streaming platforms, too.
According to NBC, over 6.5 billion sporting events were streamed live through OTT in 2018. However, the scene for live streaming through OTT was not this common until the last couple of years. Major sports leagues were holding out, forcing viewers to remain wired to their cable subscriptions.
The tides are changing and a big wave is coming for live streaming sports in the years ahead. Increasingly, sports enthusiasts will expect to watch their favorite sports events whenever and wherever they want. With 5G’s rolling out soon, both sports broadcasters and viewers will have new experiences to create and enjoy the content. If you want to learn about the significance of starting sport live streaming, you are in the right place.
Let’s understand the live sports trends, their impact in the industry and how to explore excellent business opportunities it has to offer.
Value of Video Potential in 2019
Video continues to be the most effective element in marketing strategies for a good reason. People find videos more entertaining, engaging, and memorable. Hence, they are more popular compared to other types of content on the internet. Videos offer a sense of storytelling and if you want to increase conversion, video marketing is the best way to go for it.
Source: filmora.wondershare.com
Let’s explore some more valuable statistics to prove the power of using video in increasing brand awareness.
Videos attract 300% more traffic and help to nurture leads.
A website is 50 times more likely to make it to the front page of Google if it includes videos.
Including a video on your landing page can boost your conversion rate by at least 80%
Over 50% of customers check out the product or service videos before visiting a store.
Videos have the capability to improve organic search on a website by 157%.
25% of brands publish videos every week.
Different Types of Videos Every Business Must Have to Thrive
There are different types of videos you can create for your business. From how-to videos to explainers, Q & A, and case studies – the options are practically endless. Additionally, for every type of video you want to create, there are different styles you can approach it from different orientations. Here are some of the video types you must include meeting the different needs of your customers.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos work great if you want to educate your customers about your products and services, and illustrate why they need it. Product explainer videos are a useful for explaining the working of complicated products or services and enhancing positive brand awareness. They are a high-level outlook on how particular products or services solve a customer issue. These videos have the potential to be shareable content assets, so aim to make them more engaging by connecting with viewers on a deeper level.
Teaser Videos
If you want to create brand awareness, increase traffic to a specific landing page, and generate leads, focus on creating teaser or highlight videos. Most businesses follow text-based content marketing to achieve the above-discussed elements. However, if you are into video marketing, create fun videos to promote more downloads. This works great for big events and conferences. When finding new content for videos, consider highlighting the bigger story you can pack in these.
Leadership Videos
Leadership videos are great to build thought leadership within your business or industry. It helps to establish a human connection and to share a unique perspective to build trust and user following. Leadership videos must be authentic and should focus on a specific point. Sharing the experience of professionals and starting a conversation with your target audience is the key.
Webinars
Webinars are good to educate potential customers about products and about the issues that exist in the industry. When planning new webinars, think about how to repurpose the old videos you have. Design your webinar in such a way that bite-sized video clips can be included in that.
Live Streaming Video Business Opportunities
Live streaming hasn’t been with us for long, but it is quickly gaining significance and attention among people and brands who are looking for innovative ways to deliver content to the audience. Live streaming is a powerful channel to deliver content to your viewers if you are planning about starting a sports business. As with any other marketing channels, it comes with its own challenges. However, the challenges offered by live streaming dominates the benefits it offers. Besides the benefits, live streaming offers a sense of excitement for viewers. It makes the audience feel exclusive and inclusive at the same time.
Viewers Consume Videos on Your Time
The biggest advantage of live streaming for businesses is that the audience consumes content on your time, not on their time. This implies that you are engaging with the audience who care about your brand and find your video content extremely beneficial. You are automatically targeting content at an audience that is more likely to follow and convert. No other tool is capable of achieving what live streaming does.
Reach Highly Targeted Niches
As already said, viewing a live stream needs more commitment from your followers just because they have to tune in on your time regardless of whether it’s the right time for you. This helps to keep the unrelated audiences away and reach a highly targeted audience without any additional efforts.
Takes Less Time to Implement
Implementing live stream takes less time as it just takes a button click. Unlike traditional video production like vlogs or shows, it exactly takes 5 minutes to create a 5-minute video. That’s it. However, if you are not using social media platforms to live steam, it takes a one-time effort to make a video sharing website and you will be ready to live stream anytime, anywhere.
Grow Your Audience
Maybe the best thing about live streaming is that, you can grow your audience surpassing the geographical limits. The larger your audience is; the more chance you get to convert them into customers. If you want to implement live streaming solution for sports, it will help to expand your follower base considerably.
Real-Time Engagement
One of the major reasons why live streaming is continuously making an impact on marketing is due to its ability to offer real-time user engagement and join direct communication with the influencer. Whenever you see a pre-reordered video, you are viewing the work of the past. However, live streaming facilitates real-time engagement benefits for users as it happens in the now. Not just real-time engagement, it also provides the opportunity to offer Q&A sessions, live support, and a lot more. You can effectively convey your brand’s story in real-time.
Ability To Repurpose Content
Though this point applies to any type of content, live videos can also be easily converted to other types of content such as a published video transcript on your website or as a reproduced video on YouTube. The options are limitless. Whatever is the case, it is always recommended to repurpose content for a broader reach of your brand message.
A Great Way To Cultivate Trust
Live streaming is surprisingly beneficial to create a close bond with your target audience. As you will be talking with your viewers in the most natural and real way, they feel as if they are being part of authentic interaction. Yes! Even authentic than pre-recorded and edited videos, which are well scripted. Businesses can increase trustworthiness with the help of live streaming, which leads to a great influence across the social space and helps in better conversion when promoting products and services. This will also have a direct impact on customer retention and loyalty, allowing the delivery of high-quality content immediately.
Facilitates High-Quality Content Delivery
Considering the nature of live streaming videos in general, it helps businesses to deliver the best quality content to their viewers in a convenient way. Be it news, product releases, business events, live streams bring them to the attention of followers instantaneously. Brands can also run product promotions through live streaming and offer exclusive access to viewers for a limited time- a very effective way to increase conversions and revenue. The sense of urgency created by live streaming makes it compelling to watch, making it ideal for the flash sales of products and services.
Plenty of Opportunities For Monetization
Source: streamingvideoprovider.com
For businesses that focus on generating income from websites and social channels, live streaming unveils some great monetization opportunities to monetize live sports events.
Some of the best strategies to monetize live streaming are as follows.
– Charging viewers for exclusive access to webinars
-Offering paid product reviews and getting sponsorships
-Driving traffic to your existing website or affiliate offer
-Insert Ads in the live streaming broadcast
-Selling your own products
-Selling the entire broadcast to other publishers.
Better Brand Exposure
Live streaming solution for sports is not just about highlighting your brand in front of your potential customers; you actually get a chance to educate your audience about your brand and the services you offer. This manages to bring some amazing opportunities that can be very rewarding at the end. It helps to promote your business like never before with an outcome much appreciated.
Why Video Streaming is Important
Video streaming services have changed the way people consume sports events and it is for the better. Here are some of the benefits of video streaming.
Instant Playback
Whether it is sports videos or any other videos in general, video streaming allows instant playback. Compared to the old days when people had to tune to into TV alone to watch shows and sports events, online streaming makes the content available in real-time and can be accessed by viewers regardless of their location.
Cheap
Given that there is no additional cost involved when choosing the delivery medium, videos can be cheaply distributed over the web. Even if some exclusive videos are offered for a price, it is much cheaper when compared to the other entertainment channels. Learning how to stream sports online can be of great significance as it is one of the affordable marketing tools.
More Options To Explore
With video-on-demand platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu, today’s audience has a broad range of options when it comes to the choice of online video content. Earlier if you wanted to watch the shows, you had to purchase or buy DVDs. It was required to watch what you have rented or purchased completely but now it is very easy to preview a show and decide whether to watch it or not, without having to pay extra costs. If you looking for how to start a sports website, ensure that incorporate similar features to make it easier for viewers to choose content.
Make Event Coverage Easier
These days, social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook is used to live stream, as it is easy for brands to broadcast their events without having to pay anything extra. This very significant technology helps to make event coverages easier than ever. You can also start a sports business online to make event coverages easier.
Discourages Content Piracy
The creative video industry has been suffering from piracy issues for a very long time. Many new solutions to combat piracy issues are enforced by brands, but affordability was always a problem. However, online video streaming makes entertainment very convenient and affordable. For the same reason, viewers prefer to subscribe to video streaming websites than watching pirated copies of videos and media. Hence if you are looking for different ways on how to start a sports website, now is the right time as the industry is thriving.
What You Need To Know About OTT Networks
Over the top or OTT is the term used for the delivery of TV and film content via the internet. Traditionally viewers were required to subscribe to a traditional cable network to watch favorite shows and movies at home. However, with the emergence of OTT platforms like YouTube, and Netflix, it changed how people consume entertainment.
Popular video streaming services made it possible to deliver video service over the top of the Internet rather than through expensive broadcasters and telecom providers. That is why it is significant to create a website like YouTube, Netflix, ESPN, or Twitch if you are into content production or event organization.
How Do OTT Platforms Deliver Content to Viewers?
In general, OTT platforms use an online video platform or back-end, which typically handles all the media, subscriptions, users, security and rights, etc. of the platform. The back-end is what communicates with different customer devices. The most common hardware devices used for the stream are streaming boxes or TV followed by smart TVs and internet-connected gaming consoles.
There are several development challenges involved to deliver your content to every device because each device comes with its own development stacks to create apps. A good video-sharing CMS will help to run your own video blog and it comes with additional features like SEO optimization, inbuilt security, tracking system, and a lot more.
What are the Biggest OTT Opportunities?
With video streaming services on the rise globally, OTT technology has immense potential with brands like YouTube and Netflix expanding internationally. Beyond global adoption rates, major opportunities exist in both entertainment and non-entertainment markets. Recent surveys show that over 50% of OTT subscribers pay for educational content in the form of instructional streaming platforms. Streams that focus on health-based content and children’s programming hold a lot of potentials.
OTT platforms must also consider the advantages of tired monetization. Even though most OTT solutions are subscription-based, over 20% of subscribers also made in-app purchases last year. If you plan to start a sports business online, casting a couple of monetization methods can help your OTT solution to grow in the years ahead.
With that said, as the OTT sector has moved towards live programming, sports have also become an increasingly significant part of it. The arrival of online video content without the addition of sports was a big thing several years ago. However, today we are seeing the insertion of sports into the mix by major OTT providers. With cloud-based live sports streaming software now capable of handling live content day in and out, there is an increasing amount of interest shown in carrying live events. We are currently seeing the growing trends for sports brands to go OTT themselves to reach their audience is also being a clear indicator of changing TV viewing habits.
When it comes to established OTT players, while Netflix denies taking any interest, Amazon is rapidly becoming a major force in sports. This itself is showing the NFL’s Thursday Night Football on both Prime and its Twitch subsidiary. Twitch is already a leader in the broadcast of game live streaming and eSports competitions.
If you are thinking about how to make a sports streaming website, now is the right time to enter the market with your sports streaming platform. The opportunity has never been greater with cloud-based technology helping sports brands and organizations to launch new OTT services directly targeting customers at a greater speed and much lower cost than just a few years ago.
E-sport Trends in the Video Streaming Industry
A new era of sports viewing is here and sports media companies are focused on delivering what customers really want- High quality and a reliable live stream of their favorite sports events. If you want to learn about how to stream sports online, understanding top industry trends can help.
Let’s see some of the current e-sports trends in the video streaming market.
Viewers Willing to Pay for Streaming
Sports fans are ready to spend money on a sport-streaming website than watching it on TV networks. On average, fans are ready to pay around $23 per month for unlimited access to live sports on any platform. With that said, the majority of sports fans prefer interactive content that offers the ability to chat with other fans while watching live sports.
More Focus on Latency
Earlier, the negative effects of latency used to affect the quality of live streams. Imagine you are watching a major game online and there is a lag in audio and video synchronization, which will ruin the whole viewing experience. Even as online streaming continues to grow in popularity, there are cases of broadcast feeds arriving a couple of seconds before the online feeds which are becoming a great problem. For the same reason, solving latency issues is one of the hit industry trends for 2019. Many digital media brands use the best sports streaming software integrated with CDN to offer a great viewing experience to the audience without any lags.
Solving Piracy Issues
While the shift to OTT is great, it also increases the danger of piracy. Researches shows over 50 unique illegal streamers were active during the UEFA Champions League knockout stages. Brands are increasingly becoming aware of the piracy threats and started to offer security features to streamers. In the coming years, we will see active collaboration between content owners and content protection technology brands to maintain the value of sports content by combating piracy threats.
Live Interviews With Athletes
Sport streaming websites facilitate real-time communication with sportsmen and women to increase fan engagement at sports events. An opportunity to meet their favorite sports star is enough to encourage most fans to attend more games and tournaments. Live experiences or being in the moment is just as significant as engaging with the game itself. If you are thinking about starting a sports business, ensure you incorporate live sessions with popular sports stars.
Conclusion
It’s encouraging to see how technology is influencing live streaming space as more platforms enter the industry. OTT grows in popularity among audiences, and brands are seeking innovative ways to ensure that regulatory measures are being met. However, what it ultimately comes down to is the ability to deliver the best possible experience to viewers. A professional live sports streaming software can help you deliver top-quality streaming services to your audience.
If you are a sports enthusiast wishing to build your own sports live stream setup, contact us for robust live sports streaming services with custom application development.
Video has become popular among the rising generation. Go through your social feeds, chances are most of the posts would be videos. Indeed, videos on Facebook alone have over 8 million average views. Why is it so? What is the reason for the rising popularity of videos?
In essence, the video combines the two mediums to catch viewers’ attention- visuals and audio. Opposed to text alone, combining both audio and visuals helps in conveying a message more effectively. The human brain loves videos because is it is wired to grasp visual content between pages loaded with texts.
Best Plans To Video Marketing Strategy
Whether you want to create a video sharing website like YouTube or just looking for ways to increase your existing ROIs, a well-defined video marketing strategy is necessary. While on a fundamental level, videos are important, but you need an efficient marketing strategy to take it to the next level.
So how to launch a video marketing strategy to bring more engagement and better results?
Start with the following.
Understand Your Audience and Set the Goals
Every marketing campaign must start with research. You must begin by defining your target audience. What type of content they are interested in, what challenges they engage the most? There is absolutely no point in making great videos and having it on platforms your viewers don’t visit?
Additionally, define the goals you are trying to achieve with a particular content. Do you want to drive traffic, sales, create some awareness, or achieve them all? To capitalize on your video’s ability to improve ROI and connect with your viewers, use the right tone and message to reach them. It is important to gather customer insights to know the type of videos to focus on and how much money you must spend in creating them.
Stick to a Realistic Budget
Most people make the mistake of assuming that putting in a lot of money into creating videos can make it successful. That is not the case always. When it comes to creating videos, set realistic campaign goals and define the budget. For example, spending a lot on short videos on social media is not a good idea. Instead, if you consider a captivating audience from a competitive niche, planning for a high budget makes sense.
Optimize Your Videos For Each Channel
Depending on the channel you pick to launch your videos on, you have to optimize them to drive engagements as per native prospects of the channel. For Instagram, upload short videos directly. However, if you are creating for YouTube, you have to focus on creating high-quality videos that are refined to your target audience. Whereas video optimization for Twitter is all about finding the balance between using the right keywords and fine-tune targeting.
How to Sell Video Content Online?
Have you been consistently creating video content, but not having luck with generating revenue in spite of having huge earning potentials? Selling videos online has come a long way in the past decade. The market has shifted from selling DVDs to on-demand, and now, live streaming. Like any other sales challenge, selling videos online is all about the right combination of good content, great marketing, understanding your target audience in-depth and more.
Here is a comprehensive guide on how to sell video content online and some tips for success.
Effective tips to sell your video content online
Some people assume that improving ROI with video content is just about having great content. Yes, good videos sell themselves, but that is not just enough and is not true for all niches. Let’s have a look at some of the best tips to sell your video content.
Create Content Worth Selling
Most people create low quality, duplicate content and upload it to any platform, and then worry about not being able to make any money. It is not just enough to create a website like YouTube and upload as many videos to generate revenue. To make a good amount of money from your videos, it has to be good. You must put in your creativity and talent to come with a masterpiece that is worth selling. Keep in mind that any money generating strategy takes a significant amount of time. Make sure you choose the most marketable content, style, and present it in the best way possible to the audience.
Upload and Organize Your Videos
Once you have your videos ready, the next step is to upload them to video-sharing platforms of your choice. You can upload your videos to sites like YouTube, but these platforms take complete control in terms of publishing a video and they hold the right to take down your videos without any prior notice. Alternatively, you can also create video sharing websites like YouTube of your own and upload your video content there.
When uploading videos to your platform, content organization is important to ensure maximum engagement with the audience. You can create a similar menu to help you categorize your videos into the right groups. You can use the best open-source video CMS platform to keep your videos well organized and to schedule content automatically for delivering a quality experience to the viewers.
Promote Your Videos
Make it a habit to promote your videos through social media channels to reach a wide audience. You can also live stream to announce the launch with the right strategies that focus on your target audience. You can also use platforms like YouTube to bring in a great amount of traffic to your website. Reach out to your audience via emails and alert them about your new videos and product launch.
Sell Video Content Online
Video broadcasters can earn by offering on-demand video content and by live streaming to viewers. In either way, you must implement efficient business models to make a significant amount of money. Here are some of the business models to follow.
Pay-Per-View Model
Pay per view is an effective business model to sell your videos online. You can set a fixed price for your content and viewers have to pay the same to watch your videos. If you want to offer your audience various choices to access your videos, you can create multiple pay-per-view price options. For example, you can set a $5 price for 1-hour of access and set another price of $30 for full-day access, etc.
Subscription Model
If you want to create a website like YouTube, you need not exactly follow the business model that they follow. Instead, you can limit the access of your videos to your audience via a subscription. Subscriptions can be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. This model works great when you have ongoing content to offer to your viewers, like a series or episodic content.
Advertisement Model
The advertisement model is the primary YouTube business model using which YouTube makes most of its revenue. If you want to create a video sharing website like YouTube and offer free content, but still make money, this model is the right pick. Ad-model offers free videos, but advertisements will have inserted in between free videos. Video owners earn money from sponsors who want to promote their Ads. However, you must have a popular video sharing platform with a consistent user base to make money with the Ad-based model. It works only when you have a massive user base as YouTube has.
Business Benefits of Creating a Video Sharing Website
Video marketing is one of the newest additions to your marketing toolbox. It is worth considering promoting your business via videos. Not because everyone is doing it, but because videos are one of the most versatile and profitable digital marketing tools today. Advancements in technology, social networking tools, and development of video sharing CMS have made the display and distribution of video easier.
Having a video sharing website calls for a video marketing strategy that can benefit your business in multiple ways and differentiate you from your competitors. Here are some benefits video sharing websites can bring in to your business.
Product Demonstration
Videos can make business communication a lot more powerful and effective. Doing product demonstrations through videos can have a great impact on training, marketing, and sales. Once the videos are ready and uploaded on your website, you can easily share them.
Social Engagement
Social media is growing alongside video. Over half of the global population uses social media and the numbers are only rising. As reported by various sources, social videos have a high share rate compared to text and video combined. Make sure that you offer educational or fact-based videos to your audience along with entertainment to drive engagement. It is also vital to create content that resonates with your viewers’ choices.
Boosts Email Campaigns
When you are creating videos, ensure that you incorporate it into your email marketing campaigns. It has been seen that an introductory email with a video in it increases click-through rate by 96%. The modern customers want to see the product in action. Due to the ease of consumption, video engages even the laziest buyers.
Google Love Videos
Videos help to increase the time spent by visitors on your website. This kind of longer exposures increases trust and signals search engines that your site has great content. If you have a video embedded on your website, you are 50 times more likely to show up first in search results. Make sure to optimize your videos on your website for SEO. Give catchy titles and clear descriptions. Add a link back to your site, products, and services. Explore the world of interactive videos to encourage engagements even more.
Video Doesn’t Have to be on a Film Studio Budget or Schedule
We all know that video marketing is an integral part to improve ROI, but how easy is it to create high-quality videos? Creating great videos on a budget is a significant challenge to tackle. However, there are effective ways to create top-quality videos without having a high budget or a schedule.
Invest in the Basics
If you are a content creator who plans to shoot many videos, invest in a good quality video gear like a digital camera, microphone, tripod, and lighting kit. Being a long-term investment, it is important to adhere to this if you are planning to film videos on your own. If you want to create business videos for your company, you can also collaborate with professional content creators to come up with quality videos. Using your smartphones to shoot videos is also a great idea to start with, but you should consider upgrading your MO as you grow.
Keep Your Videos Short
Viewers, in general, have limited patience and attention span. If you want to drive maximum engagement for your videos, make sure it doesn’t exceed 2 minutes. Make your script as short as possible and ensure you take down unnecessary bits during editing. This not only helps to keep your viewers engaged, but it also reduces the cost if you are hiring a designer to edit your videos.
Create a Video Strategy
If you want to create videos on a minimum budget, you must have an efficient video strategy. This helps you to reduce additional costs by driving your focus in the right direction. Having a video marketing strategy can help you create more high-quality videos. Some important aspects of an effective video strategy are as follows.
Your budget
Ideal target audience
Objectives to share videos online
The frequency of uploading videos.
The type of content required as per your objectives
How video sharing scripts can help video content?
A few years ago, the answer to the question ‘how to make a website like YouTube without coding‘, was near to impossible. However, today, technology has practically made it possible. Launching a video sharing website is no more a difficult task, thanks to ready-made video sharing scripts.
Video sharing scripts are ready-made clone scripts that help you to launch your video streaming business and the website instantly. However, not all video-sharing website scripts are competent to fulfill your needs. You must go for a white-labeled solution to acquire full-fledged features and the ability to customize the script so that it matches your brand identity and expectations. Let’s see what you can achieve with video sharing scripts these days.
Create Video Sharing Websites
If you are a content creator or a business trying to achieve from more than what YouTube or Vimeo can offer, you need to build your video sharing website. Video sharing scripts can build clones of popular video sharing websites like YouTube, Twitch, Daily Motion, or Vimeo. If you want to start a website like YouTube in a cost-effective way, there are no better ways than video scripts. With your video-sharing website, you can incorporate an advertisement model, subscription model, transactional model, or a combination of all three to monetize extra.
Enterprise Video Content Management
Businesses can utilize videos for promotions, Ads, brand education, tutorials, customer support, and for a lot more. The challenge is to organize the videos systematically and a video CMS helps with that.
Public video sharing platforms like YouTube doesn’t allow you to classify proprietary videos to avoid unintentional distribution with an unauthorized audience, which is critical for enterprises. That is why you must have your own open-source video CMS to utilize video categorization, scheduling, having access control at multiple levels, authorized distribution, etc.
Monetization
If you are a video creator, you must have goals beyond video sharing. You might be looking for answers to questions like how to sell video content online. Websites like YouTube and Daily Motion are the best platforms to start with. However, if you are already on these channels, you know Ad-monetization is not enough to build a stable career of your own. Having a video sharing platform of your own will allow you to formulate your policies and this will, in turn, bring in more revenue.
Live Streaming
Video sharing scripts also offer live streaming solutions to incorporate the endless benefits of real-time videos in your business. Businesses can use live streams to interconnect and inter-promote their platforms. Moreover, it also offers a broad range of benefits like growing your audience, reduces training costs, increases ROI, improves audience interaction, makes sales better, etc.
How to Measure the Success of Your Video Content?
Now that you know how to establish the best video marketing strategy for your business, you need to measure the success of your video content campaigns. Before you get into the metrics, you need to define success that will allow you to do the right analysis of the success of your videos. List down what you are trying to achieve. Sharpen your focus to one goal at a time and determine the type of audience to whom you will be addressing the videos.
Here are some of the important metrics you must measure to know how successful your videos are.
Views to Know the Scope of Your Influence
Views for your videos are the most important metrics you need to measure to know the scope of your influence. The number of times your videos have been watched tells about to extent to which you reached among your target audience. However, don’t analyze the number of views as the ultimate element of success as it is the shallowest indication of your campaigns. Views represent the first step of the whole process of measuring the success of your videos. Besides, when you first create a video sharing website like YouTube, it takes some time to generate a desirable number of views with your new website. The quality of the content contributes to an increased number of views.
Engagement to Measure Quality
Have a look at the engagement you get from your target audience to measure the quality of your videos. When you make a website like YouTube, keep a check on the quality of the videos uploaded to the site as engagement is linked directly to the quality and uniqueness of the content. Engagement goes beyond the view count, a good engagement for your video shows how successful your videos are in reaching and connecting with your audience. This also shows that whether your videos can deliver the message you want to convey.
Play Rate to Assess the Relevance
Having your videos embedded on your site using the best video sharing CMS contributes to improvement on two major metrics simultaneously- play count and page views. Play rate of videos is a blend of these two metrics and shows the number of people who visited your website and watched your videos. Play rates help to understand the type of content that gets more responses from the audience. It is also a good indicator of the ideal location of videos on your site. It gives a clear idea of whether your videos are in the right place to invite attention. This metric helps to gain insights that assist in making structural changes to your website for engaging the viewers into pre-designed call-to-actions, too.
Shares to Evaluate Social Impact
Create a YouTube-like website to upload and share your content, which can have a great impact on your social engagement. The number of people sharing your videos can say a lot about its ability to reach and connect with viewers. Shareability is a quality to incorporate in your content because it multiplies your marketing efforts and increases views significantly, which in turn have a positive influence on your ROI.
CTR to Measure Client Reactions
Click-through-rate or CTR shows the percentage of viewers who click on the call-to-action that you have incorporated your videos. If you are planning to create a YouTube-like website, CTR is something that you have to consider to analyze the ability of engagements in your videos. Having a high CTR indicates that you were successful in making your audience watch your videos until a call-to-action showed up.
Analyzing your video content from the CTR angle is critical to measure their power to generate sales and conversions. If you see, despite more people watching your videos, the number of sales doesn’t go up, understand that you must change the location of your CTA.
Conversion Rate to Measure Success
Conversation rate is arguably the most significant metric of all, especially if you are looking to measure the success of your video content. Conversion rate measures the total number of leads or customers your video was able to gain. However, it is one of the most difficult metrics to evaluate and you need resources like Google Analytics to measure it right. The important step is to define the meaning of conversions to you. For example, it can be a visitor clicking on a thumbnail, downloading something, filling out a form, or even buying your products.
Conclusion
Today, more than ever, content creators and brands are realizing the business benefits of video content. With the myriad of content choices and ways to create video sharing websites like YouTube, videos have become a core way to drive engagement and brand awareness. Content owners with a vast library of videos must move beyond the Ad-supported video platforms and build their own business models to improve ROI with original video content. Create a video sharing website of your own using the best open source video CMS platform and feature your content to generate untapped revenue, rather than dealing with the limitations of third-party platforms.
How many times have you watched a video and seen a product that instantly caught your eye? And then you proceed to the description to find the product link. You are not alone. Now imagine the ability to click on a product, add to the cart, and checkout- all within a video or after the video. This is the value proposition that drives the concept of shoppable video.
What is Shoppable Video?
A shoppable video is a multimedia recording that allows users to initiate a purchase from the video. More advanced versions of shoppable videos allow you to directly make a purchase from the video window itself. Whereas, in a non-interactive video, the URL of the product link is displayed instead of a clickable action. Shoppable videos are a type of interactive video.
How Does It Work?
Shoppable videos are the right blend of commerce and content. A shoppable video content removes the gap between the content and the underlying buying process. Creating an impressive content is very important as it ensures people are watching your full video and not miss the products displayed in between.
Features like Hulu’s shoppable previews allow the on-demand audience to buy movie tickets with just their remotes. This is a practical tool that simplifies the whole process into instant sales.
As technology keeps advancing, more interactive elements and shoppability will be integrated into the viewer’s favorite movies and TV shows on OTT platforms. Shoppable videos are a perfect way to help shoppers make purchase decisions. Ultimately, leading to a significant boost in sales. The audience is looking for more engaging and interactive content from their favorite brands. You can incorporate shoppable content into your OTT platform and leverage the most potential revenue stream. For launching your OTT platform, you can use ready-made solutions to stream your video content.
Brands are looking for ways to reduce the gap between marketing and purchasing. Shoppable videos are able to achieve both. It helps to build a personal link between a customer and products to increase customer engagement. Most importantly, this shortens the customer decision making a path to boost your sales.
Benefits of Shoppable Videos
There are many benefits associated with shoppable videos and marketing products on an OTT platform. Some of them are:
Simplified Buying Funnel
The video content becomes instantly shoppable and this simplifies the buying funnel.
Increased Customer Engagement
Shoppable videos have increased customer engagement and offer optimum ROI. They are one of the perfect ways to increase user engagement, conversion rate and to decrease shopping cart abandonment rates.
Invaluable Performance Insights
Most OTT platforms, offering shoppable videos also gather significant real-time performance data. This data allows businesses to find out the best performing elements of their campaigns. Ultimately, it helps to get more potential customers.
Top strategies to launch successful shoppable videos
Here are the top strategies that OTT services must implement in their platform to launch successful shoppable videos.
Incorporate Shopping Into The Viewer’s Experience
People are inspired by the products in the videos they watch. However, there is no easy way to direct customers into the buying process. OTT platforms can shorten the search and buying cycle and make the shopping experience seamless with convenient shoppable videos. For the same reasons, most customers are more likely to become open to shoppable videos as a part of their regular viewing experience.
Craft a Less Intrusive Experience
Shoppable videos improve the viewing experience. However, if not designed in the right way, they might just not give the desired results. Today, most videos add dots to indicate the interactive element. However, OTT providers must design a less intrusive experience to notify viewers about shoppable elements in the videos they are watching. The cues can either appear in the opening part or during the end credits, which can be switched on or off as required.
Create Branded Content In A Measurable Way
Branded content is a new emergence in OTT programming and live streaming platforms. Brands are subtle when it comes to product placement in videos, but this just provides brand impression data. However, with shoppable videos, content owners can track click-to-view, click-to-buy, and click-to-share interactions, and ultimately will get a clear view of conversion data.
Branded content within a movie or TV show allow the audience to either seek more info about the product onscreen or click-to-buy. This may transform the way brands and content owners monetize using this Ad format.
Don’t Overdo Interactivity
Interactive OTT opens up plenty of opportunities to offer customers with everything from general entertainment to super-niche offers. It activates new revenue streams like shoppable videos, non-intrusive sponsorships, and individually targeted advertising.
There is no better time to convert a visitor when they are enjoying a well-crafted content. Whether it’s a shoppable show, or purchasing products from a favorite artist, or ability to donate to your favorite filmmaker, any video commerce is easy to use and frictionless. Most importantly, it must never get in the way of content, but must be able to enhance and convert it.
Conclusion
For OTT players, customer acquisition and retention is a major challenge. Revenue models that are subscription-based, ad-centric or a combination of both only offer a sustainable business model to a certain extent. Shoppable videos give a completely new revenue stream potential that also helps to differentiate OTT service offerings in the midst of tight competitions.
By adding commerce and interactive elements, OTT and live streaming platforms can explore the measurable impact of shoppable videos in their sales. Shoppable videos can link directly to the point of purchase, allowing OTT platforms to go beyond general advertising.
Moreover, advertisers can get some additional ways to market their products and uncover user buying preferences, all with the trackable conversions and data they desire. The possibilities with shoppable video commerce can be endless.
YouTube is a powerful video-sharing platform and the most effective way to showcase your creation as it gives better exposure to your videos. There is no denying the fact. As a google affiliated with over a billion users, YouTube is the largest search engine, second to google. However, is it very helpful in making a profit by uploading your videos? When it comes to making a profit, YouTube lacks a lot of things. In this scenario, uploading your videos on Live streaming platform is a great idea to generate more revenue. Instead of uploading your videos on sites like YouTube, you have to take advantage of technology to establish a professional online presence. If you have a live video streaming platform on your own, you can upload your videos without any restrictions from third-party.
Video content providers, here is why you have to create your video on demand platform instead of uploading your video on YouTube for free.
Own Your Creative Work
Uploading your videos on YouTube will have restrictions on your creatives. What does a video on demand platform mean toStreaming Video Content providers? It must give the creator adequate freedom to decide how the videos must be showcased to users. On your own video platform, no one will remove your videos without letting you know.
You can also decide whether you want to sell video content online for free or for a price. A video on demand website of your own is just like a platform where you have full control of the feel, design, audio, and behavior completely. This is your place where you can invite your audience to create a brand identity by customizing things from header to footer.
Spread Your Influence
If you wonderhow to sell video content online, a video on demand platform is a website that allows your audience to buy your creations. You can also integrate your social media profiles on the website which enable you to spread your influence even further. You can take a step to further spread your influence through forums or your website blog. The video-on-demand platform serves as an opportunity to present your creations and people know about your brand even more in detail.
Offer Exclusive Content
If you are a good Video-on-demand content provider, never do it for free. Because you can actually make good revenue from it and offer exclusive content to entice your target audience. For example, if you are a video creator offering fitness content, you can post a preview video of your new workout series. On YouTube, it is possible to offer the initial session of your workout videos as a free demo.
Whereas, on your website, you can sell the entire workout series for a given price. You can also sync the content from your social media on your website. The best part? You can double the benefits by increasing your website reach and video views on your site and on theLive streaming platformas well. Once you have your content forever on your site, it helps in turning your casual visitors to a devoted audience.
Engage With Your Audience
Even the most popular YouTube celebrities have their own website to keep their audience updated. Use your website to engage your audience as the popular influencers do. On your website, you can interact with your audience by keeping them informed about your upcoming events, ticket sales, exciting discounts, tours, etc.
Grow Your Business Potential
A Live streaming platform is the best place to promote your business. Unlike YouTube, if you have your website, you can create newsletters. Through this, your community can receive the first look of your videos and they would always be updated and informed. Additionally, your video platform will help you grow an email subscription list of valuable contacts by adding the info of every user who signs up.
Leo Laporte has a YouTube channel and now he is a part of the Drupal-powered Twit.tv, an internet podcast network. When you have your own platform, the choices are endless and there are plenty of ways to promote yourself as a brand. No matter what your requirements are- An online portfolio, film trailer site or a production blog, you will have a place to direct your audience too.
How To Implement Video On Demand?
With on-demand platforms, the number of videos and the duration of videos allowed is unlimited. As bandwidth and viewing are unlimited, you don’t have to worry about the costs involved for bandwidth. While the reach of YouTube videos is quite broad considering its popularity, your own video on demand platform allows you to deliver videos to a global market along with a variety of other features. Beyond all, video on demand platforms can allow video content creators to set up their storefront in any language from the landing page to the billing page. It also allows subtitles and closed captioning in any language.
Designing Your Video-On-Demand Platform
Once you have the right foundation, you can start by designing your video-on-demand platform. Consider this as the user experience part of the whole process. You have to design and build all the parts of your website that your customers will come in contact with or see through your marketing strategies. You can add in features like images, layouts, logos and have to stick to the coding framework. Here are some essential features for designing your video-on-demand platform.
Video Focused Platform
When you design an on-demand platform to showcase your videos, the website has to be well equipped to focus on displaying and categorizing your videos.
Mobile Responsive
Your website has to be mobile friendly with responsive themes which adapts to smartphones and tablets.
Static Landing Pages
Create pages on your website for people to subscribe to your mailing list and purchase your products.
SEO Ready
Your website theme must also allow the pages to be SEO ready.
Conclusion
Video on demand is expanding from a marketing strategy and evolving into a business model. Popular video-on-demand platforms like YouTube has a built-in audience, but if you want to generate good income selling videos online, hosting your video on demand platform is the ideal way. Having a video platform facilitatesStreaming Video Content providersto keep the viewers informed about the new updates and additions, which is an excellent selling point. On-demand streaming platforms are not only evolving as a significant part of business models, but they are also actually the foundations of most businesses. It is a great way to create a solid user base while making a good ROI by sharing your video creations.
Being a professional game streamer is no less than a real job. There is nothing more satisfying and exciting than to be able to do what you like the most for a living. If you are someone who is addicted to gaming, can’t live without your hobby, have a combination of business knacks, and communication skills, you are eligible to make money with Twitch.
What Is Twitch
To start with, Twitch is a popular video game streaming service by Amazon. In 2011, Twitch was launched with a sole focus on video games, but later it was expanded to include streams dedicated to music, shows, artworks, and occasional TV series. The streaming service boasts over 2 million unique streamers each month and thousands of these users make money through the Twitch partner program.
Later in 2014, Twitch was purchased by Amazon. Twitch partner program is nothing but a service which offers streamers with additional features like ad placements and paid subscriptions. While not all streamers on Twitch has quit their job, it is true that an impressive number of people make a full time living out of it bylive streaming games. Users make money through different ways like micro-donations (Bits), recurring paid subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate sales, and ads. However, achieving impressive financial success on Twitch involves hard work and dedication as the most popular Twitch partners stream 5-7 days every week to stabilize their user base.
Different Ways To Earn With Twitch
Twitch Bits
In Twitch, accepting donations from viewers is a common way to earn while streaming. The official donation system of Twitch is Bits, which is available only for Twitch partners and affiliates. However, it is not the ones that enable sending money to a streamer with just the push of a button, it is more complicated. Bits are a type of digital currency, which can be purchased from Twitch with real cash using amazon payments.
Twitch bits can be used within Twitch’s chat box to trigger audio and video alerts onscreen. Streamers can earn special badged for using their bits. The more bits they use, the higher the rank of badges they can earn. A Twitch streamer earns $1 for every 100 bits used during the stream.
Ask for Donations
Once you sign up to the stream, you can add a donation button in your channel to allow viewers to send in their contributions. Donations can range from $1 to thousands of dollars. Another easy way to accept donations is via PayPal. You can also set up a PayPal link to receive donations. Accepting donations on Twitch is a common practice. When you grow your channel and have millions of followers, you can opt to become a Twitch partner.
Subscription Programs
Twitch affiliates and partners can accept monthly subscriptions from the audience. One subscription costs around $4.99 each month. For every subscription, the streamer receives 50% of that revenue. So most streamers receive $2.50 for each monthly subscription from viewers. With subscriptions, viewers gain access to badges and emoticons which shows up in the chat. Subscriptions are just like a token of appreciation and loyalty from viewers.
For example,TSM_Hamlinzis a top twitch streamer with over 1 million (1973352) subscribers who has multiple brand partnership with brands like Lenovo, GrubHub, GFuel, TSMshop.com, Logitech, etc. All the brands which he is a part of being featured in his twitch profile too. He also offers a 3 tier subscription plan for his followers with many perks. He is a part of Team Solo Mid or TSM Premiere ESports team based in the US.
A newer benefit to the Twitch subscription is the addition of Twitch prime. When you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you get a free Twitch subscription per month. In 2019, almost everyone has an amazon prime membership and Twitch primes have considerably increased the incomes streamers receive.
Ad Revenue
Revenue earned from advertisements is a monetization tool available only to Twitch partners. When a stream activates their commercial button, viewers receive a video ad. Twitch monitors the number of views for each ad and keep track of the same. Streamers are paid a fixed amount per 1000 views. That figure is referred to as Cost per Mile or CPM.
CPM rate changes are not just based on the quantity, but also on the quality of advertisers bidding to Twitch. Generally, the CPM rate varies between $1-$10. The duration between each can be adjusted by streamers accordingly. While the CPM range seems small, when you break it down it becomes more impressive. For example, a streamer earns 1000 views for an 8-hour stream display ad that displays three times per hour with a CPM rate of $3. This means that the streamer receives $3 per and $9 per hour.
In total, that day they will receive $72 as ad revenue. However, not every user allows advertisements between streams, most of them use ad-block. But don’t get discouraged, ads are still a significant component toearn money with live streamingon Twitch.
How to Become a Twitch Affiliate and Partner?
To become a Twitch affiliate and partner, you got to know the statistical requirements. Here are some of the requirements to qualify as a Twitch affiliate.
You must stream for over 500 minutes in the last 30 days.
You must stream on 7 separate days in the last 30 days.
You must have had the latest 3 viewers for every time you streamed in the last 30 days.
You need to have at least 50 followers.
Now that you know these requirements, how do you get there? Don’t worry. Though it seems a tough task, you can achieve the goal if you follow these.
Small goals
Community building
Quality of your stream
To gain more followers, play games you like and enjoy. Then you will earn viewers who have a similar liking and you can build a community. Ensure that you have a consistent brand name across your social media channels. Interact with the community you build so it makes people follow you.
Twitch Partner Requirements
Become a Twitch affiliate
You must have streamed above 25 in the last month.
You must have streamed on 12 separate days it the last month.
You must have at least 75 consistent viewers for every streamed content in the last month.
Twitch has a very consistent system to track these achievements. It is called “Path to partner: If you have achieved Twitch affiliate status, then the next task is to earn 75+ viewers on every stream. Out of all, this might be the most difficult one to achieve. The length and the number of the stream can be easily controlled, but not the number of views. The only way to achieve this is to improve your viewing experience so that viewers come back to you every time. Start with less popular games and even after earning Twitch affiliate, follow the same. Play less famous games until you form a foundation of consistent viewership. The audience will follow you no matter what game is played.
Tips to Become a Twitch Affiliate and Partner
Keep Improving Your Stream Quality
The key to earning a consistent viewer base would be to keep improving the quality of your stream. Do not let audio issues, overlays, donations not showing up, etc. get on your way to Twitch partnership. To keep it going you can even use any greatlive streaming platformswhere you can manage chatbots, loyalty, themes, overlays, etc. Make use of the tools available to offer stunning graphics, overlays and improve the quality of presentation to your community.
Be Social
When you have a community, it becomes important to interact with them on a consistent basis. Keep expanding your audience by interacting and collaborating with other streamers.
Melipastelis a popular partnered variety streamer for Twitch.TV who streams on almost every genre including action, role play, platform, shooter or anything that perks her fancy. She joined Twitch in October 2014 and going strong with 1,82,326 followers in her list. She offers subscriptions for an affordable fee which include perks like subscriber badges, chat, ad-free, private group access, song requests, subscription-only games, and giveaways. She streams mainly between PS4 and PC. She is quite active on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Check what do other streamers overlays look like. What about their panels below the stream?What they do on their website and social media. Never copy others, but to learn from them, and develop your personal style which sets you apart from other streamers. Make efforts to welcome new viewers by calling out their user names. Put your chat ahead of anything else.
Find a Schedule and Stick To It
To be consistent with your streams, you must create a schedule that works for you and your audience. Once you define a schedule, make sure that you stick on to it. Some slots might be more accessible than others. Maybe you can stream only during the morning or in events. Try different streaming slots throughout the day to choose the one comfortable for you and what yield more average viewers.
Jennais a true passionate streamer who started gaming on XBOX at the age of 5. Being a full-time streamer she has got a follower base of 1,92,960 with just 46 videos. She currently plays Fortnite, Apex Legends, Oldschool Runescape, Stronghold Crusader, and Stronghold 2. Her twitch channel is growing fast and she is an active streamer who streams randomly but almost every day of the week she will be active.
Develop Your Personal Brand
Streamers behave and look entirely different from what they really are while they stream. If you decide to change your getup or wear a particular outfit to create a character while streaming, you are free to do whatever that makes you confident. There is no limit to what you can come up with as long as it adheres to the terms of service of Twitch. The way you present yourself to your viewers helps you develop a unique brand that your audience will identify. When you start with, think about creating your personal brand.
Set up a Perfect Stream with Advanced Visuals
The most popular streamers on Twitch not only has a great sound set up, but they also use lots of advanced video and visual setups. A combination of audio effects, transitions and stunning graphics throughout the streaming sessions will make your viewers happy. These days, with all the access to modern technology, it is quite simple to create different scenarios around your stream. You just have to be creative with overlays and animations. Try using images and graphics to customize your channel for a theme and pretty look and feel.
Conclusion
The key to making the most money out of your streaming in Twitch is to gain viewership. As views of your stream increase, the money you earn will also go up. What you need to understand is, making money on Twitch is not as easy as it sounds. Like anything else in your life, building a community on Twitch from the ground needs a lot of dedication and hard work. Behind every success story you see on Twitch, there are thousands of streamers who tried to recreate it and failed. Most of the times streamers fail because they were just copying others and couldn’t build their own brand with consistency. Hard work, consistency, passion, and dedications are what will help you to make money as a Twitch streamer. Most Twitch affiliate partnerships are for video games or video game-related merchandise. With these tips and tricks, you can make an insane amount of money by streaming your favorite games through Twitch.
