7 Reasons To Start A Video On-Demand Business in 2020

7 Reasons To Start A Video On-Demand Business in 2020

The transition that is happening in the digital landscape where people are consuming videos more than ever before offers a lot of new opportunities for businesses. The strong increase in internet speeds and devices that supports high-quality video consumptions is giving viewers more control over when and where to watch a video. With the trend of watching videos through smartphone apps gaining remarkable attention, an entire industry based on on-demand video streaming platforms has emerged in recent years. Content providers can leverage these opportunities by providing their offerings via VOD platforms. 

If that is not enough, there are 7 reasons to start a video on demand business in 2020. 

1. Demand Never Drops

Just have a look at the incredible numbers of Netflix to know that it has already replaced the broadcast TV as the center of peoples viewing culture. With over 183 million subscribers spread across the globe, Netflix features the highest-rated entertainment shows. 

In the recent coronavirus quarantine times, all home entertainment services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. are seeing higher viewership and increased member growth. If you are thinking about how to start a video on demand business, there is no better time than now. There are reasons for that- this demand is never going to end, but is only expected to rise tremendously in the coming years. 

2. Flexibility and Convenience

Video on demand platforms like Netflix is accessible to everyone, anywhere, and at any time. Users can access the VOD platform with a single button click using the device of their choices like smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets, or connected TV. No matter how wide is your user base, all of them can enjoy unlimited access. Offering worldwide connectivity and accessibility means you will have a broad global audience and can grow your business as a profitable one.

3. Quick and Low-Cost Setup

It is true that if you are developing an on demand video streaming platform from scratch, your VOD platform can cost you thousands of dollars. However, you necessarily don’t have to follow this development approach. 

Consider creating a subscription video on demand service using a white label solution to customize your VOD platform according to your requirements. All the basic and advanced features would be included in the purchase and you can customize the design and features. When you start out, begin with minimal features and add better functionalities as you grow. Like every business, you need to consider some operating costs as well like domain and hosting.

4. It is really profitable

Having your VOD business is a lucrative revenue stream that can help you make a lot of money. Your content needs to be really good though, and you have to invest in marketing efforts to bring in audiences. If you are planning to create a subscription video on demand service, you receive a steady stream of income of every month provided that you have a stable user base. 

Let’s look at some of the common VOD business models. 

  • Subscription Video On Demand

Subscription-video-on-demand-streamhash

Subscription video demand is the most common business model followed by most VOD businesses. This business model facilitates users to access TV shows and movies. Popular VOD platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime provide monthly subscriptions through multiple accounts so that up to 4 persons can access the platform through the same account on different devices. 

  • Advertisement Video On Demand

Another business model is an advertisement-supported video on demand where users can access videos for free along with advertisements that play at the beginning, middle, or at the end of the video. For example, YouTube works primarily on this business model. You can use this business model for your on demand video streaming platform if you want to gain more users when you are starting out as the content is offered for free. However, if you don’t have good viewership, the income earned would be quite low. Another alternative is to use the advertising business model in combination with SVOD or TVOD which is going to be briefed below. 

  • Transactional Video On Demand

Transactional-video-on-demand-streamhash

Transactional video on demand is one of the flexible business models that allow you to enable customers to pay for each video they watch instead of subscribing to a package for unlimited users. Not all users might be interested in paying for accessing the entire content library. Instead, they would just prefer to watch the content they like. iTunes and YouTube are examples of TVOD business models. 

5. You have Full Creative Control

If you are a media brand or an independent content creator, on demand video streaming platform of your own will give you complete control over the creatives. There are no guidelines you have to abide by, you create your own rules. You have the flexibility to set rules, design your platform the way you want, add the features you like without having to compromise your creative vision. 

And, if you create movies, you don’t have to wait for streaming services like Netflix to buy your films. By putting up your creations on your VOD platform, you can control distribution, marketing, and pricing.

6. Offers Valuable Insights

Being a media brand that produces content, you need to constantly work on improving the customer experience as you expand. Setting up an on demand video streaming platform is not just an effective way to connect with your target audience, but is also a great platform to gain valuable insights about customer’s interests and preferences. VOD platforms come with in-built analytics and reporting tools that help you to collect customer data, including their viewing behavior, browsing history, watching time, etc. A well-structured video on demand business allows you to collect significant data from your audience which you can later use to improve customer experience and thereby refine your offerings.

7. You can Create a Passionate Online Community

If you take any of the popular video on demand platforms, they all have a strong online community which makes them prominent in the market. For example, if you take Netflix, the VOD giant has over 22.8 million followers on Instagram whom they engage using interactive images, memes, and videos. 

create-a-passionate-online-community-streamhash

Likewise, by creating a subscription video on demand service, you can also build a community around your niche that you are passionate about. It is easy to bring people together around a topic they love and creating a community that is passionate in that niche is one of the strong and profitable reasons to start a VOD business. 

Creating your Video on Demand Platform

If you want to start a video on demand business, the first step is to create a full-fledged VOD platform to power your business. You might be surprised to learn that creating your own on demand video streaming platform is easy and affordable. If you are looking for faster deployment at effective costs, consider creating your VOD website using white label solutions. White label solutions are readymade scripts or clone scripts with all the standard features of Netflix. StreamView is the finest clone solution to launch your Netflix like website for your users. 

With StreamView, you can customize your website to suit all your requirements from adding features to modifying the front-end UI. Integrate features like support for unlimited users and videos, multiple upload channels, dynamic admin panel, multiple monetization channels, PayPal payment gateway integration, native android, and iOS app, etc. 

Conclusion

With online video consumption increasing rapidly, 92% of marketers believe that on demand videos are an important part of their marketing strategy. If you are a video production brand considering venturing into the niche of video on demand in 2020, think no further. And with advanced technology, it’s easier to do. Make sure you fend the requirements of your viewers through your VOD platform with custom features and functionalities that attracts them to your website. It is not just about the content you have in your VOD platforms, it’s about the experience you offer to your viewers. If you are looking for further assistance in building your VOD platform, get in touch with us. We will help you take your dream further. 

How To Choose a Video On Demand Solution to Power Your Business

How To Choose a Video On Demand Solution to Power Your Business

The popularity of video on demand has revolutionized the way videos are viewed and broadcasted over the web. VOD allows people to watch videos from any internet-enabled device at the time convenient to users. The convenience of viewing entertaining content, educational tutorials, etc. from virtually on any devices from anywhere is the beauty of VOD. 

VOD is transforming itself from a marketing technique and evolving into a famous business model. While Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. are mainstream brands that have built their businesses around VOD but an increasing number of businesses of all sizes and niches are making it a key part of their business model. You can make your videos exclusively available to everyone online or your subscribers only. Basically, the content will remain online and in most cases, extensive video libraries are created.

In this blog, let’s explore in-depth on how to choose the best VOD platform with powerful features and interactive tools that enhances the virtual experience for your audience. 

Why is Video Demand Important for Businesses?

Reports show that the video streaming industry is a lucrative one that is expected to be $70.5 billion by 2021. However, it is not just the business model, but also the efficacy of the VOD platform that makes it very popular. If you are a video production company with a competent business plan, you can start your own VOD platform to secure your own space in the market. Not just media companies, fitness brands, sports brands, educators, food bloggers, etc. have scope to develop their VOD platform to present excellent ways to generate profit from video content instead of just offering it as an addition to basic content. For example, Nia TV is a great example. Nia TV is an on demand fitness platform that offers users at-home workouts and podcasts to embrace a fit lifestyle.

Why-is-video-on-demand-important-for-businesses

Choosing the Best Video On Demand Platform Providers

Before launching your video on demand platform, you will have to build a strong library of videos especially if you are going to implement a subscription-based business. You must have a vast library of content your users feel worth to invest in. If you don’t have a large library but want you to launch your business, you can start with an advertisement or pay per view business model allowing your users to watch videos for free or pay for individual videos alone respectively.

While you can leverage free platforms like YouTube which has a built-in audience, creating your VOD websites is the best bet if you want to generate revenue by selling videos online and bringing more visitors to your website.

When you want to develop a VOD platform, it is equally important to choose the best video on demand platform providers. Choosing a white-label video streaming solution that can be personalized according to the requirements of your business is the best bet. Here are some of the important features to look for in your VOD solution to ensure you are signing up for the best deal that offers value for the money you spent. 

Intuitive Search and Smart Recommendations

Intuitive search and smart video recommendations are one of the most important features of any on demand video streaming platform. Intuitive search allows to predict the query in real-time as the user types and suggests the videos similar to videos users are looking for. It also helps to search for videos using titles, categories, subcategories, and genre along with the ability to search for users in their username. Smart and personalized video recommendations are yet another important feature that delivers videos that match to the viewer’s preferences and search history

Unlimited Video Uploads and Categories

A good enterprise video streaming solution must be scalable enough to cater to your growing business. It must support unlimited video uploads and categories regardless of the niche. 

Multi-Screen Support

Look for a solution that offers support for multiple devices to deliver a multi-screen viewing experience with the power of technology. There are video on demand platform providers who offer support for Android TV, along with Android and iOS apps, tablets, and other digital devices. 

Reliable Video Streaming Server

Look for a service provider that supports reliable streaming no matter the device your users use or the network condition. If you want to know how to set up a video streaming server, it is important to know the quality of streaming you want to deliver. Ngnix server is an open-source web server that is used by some of the biggest enterprises like Google, Adobe, Autodesk, Cisco, Apple, Intel, LinkedIn, DuckDuckGo, and more. Nginx server effortlessly converts the HTTP format to HLS and RTMP format for the website, Android, and iOS respectively. 

As the strong points of this streaming server are performance optimization and high concurrency and low memory usage, it outperforms other web servers. Some of the common features of this video streaming server are. 

  • Load balancing
  • Asynchronous processing
  • Reverse proxy with caching
  • Web sockets
  • FastCGI support with caching

SEO Friendly

To run a successful on demand video streaming platform, one of the important factors your enterprise video solution must have is SEO optimization. It must feature SEO optimizations that enable you to bring in more traffic and thereby more exposure to your video platform. Any user who searches for the videos in your platform must be able to easily find it with any common search engines. This is when an SEO friendly solution helps you to optimize your content and videos on Google and Bing. 

Diverse Monetization Channels

An enterprise video streaming solution must be the one that allows supporting multiple monetization channels. Accelerate your revenue generation with monetization models like subscription-based, advertisement-based, transaction model (Pay-per-view), and hybrid monetization model. Flexible monetization support (like the one YouTube offers) allows your platform to monetize through both audio and video streaming efficiently.

Payment Integrations

If you are seriously thinking about how to start a video on demand business, you must expect your platform to cater to users with diverse payment requirements. While some of your users prefer to make payments on your video platform using credit cards, some might prefer to use online wallets. 

Make sure you don’t miss out on any of your users just because they don’t find the most commonly available payment integrations in your video platform. Also ensure that the payment gateway you choose supports different monetization channels like subscription-based, ad-based, and pay-per-view, or a hybrid model that supports your business goals. A secure payment gateway will also make sure it supports different payment methods and make collecting payments from users simpler. 

Dynamic Admin Panel

To run your video streaming business flexibly, you need to have full control over your business. A dynamic admin panel is the most significant aspect that helps you to control your account, videos, and users on your video platform. 

It also helps in controlling the monetization aspects of your platform and collecting commissions. A powerful admin panel will also allow you to convert high-resolution videos to a lower resolution when uploading the videos if necessary making the uploading process fast and smooth. 

Referral Programs

When you are launching an on demand video streaming platform, it is important to gain new users and referral codes work great for this purpose. Recommendations help to bring in new users to your video platform. When a new user registers to your video website using a referral code, your platform can offer some credits to them which will be stored in a built-in wallet. Look for an enterprise video streaming solution that offers this important feature. 

Native Android and iOS Application

As we live in a smart digital world, a good number of your users would be those who use mobile devices to watch videos. This is exactly why you need native Android and iOS apps for your video streaming platform to increase your business exposure and promote the growth of your brand. Mobile apps can also be leveraged as a powerful marketing tool in researching and targeting your potential customers. 

Analytics and Reports

The best enterprise video streaming solution features built-in tools for powerful analytics to track the performance of your videos and the platform in general. With this feature, you can easily determine what type of videos are driving more views to your video platform and facilitating better engagement. By analyzing the behavior of your users, you can bring in more exposure and revenue to your business.

Security

The security of your communications is critical. Choose video on demand platform providers who offer solutions with multiple layers of security natively built into the solution like a restriction to access page source elements and console, geofencing, etc. Deploy secure experiences that delight your users with safe and secure navigation, search, and video delivery across all platforms and devices. 

Lead the Video Streaming Industry with your On-Demand Video Streaming Platform

Redefine the way entertainment is delivered to your customers by building your own video on demand platform. If you are looking for how to start a video on demand business, choose StreamView which is one of the best VOD solutions that facilitates creating a professional video website for a competitive price. 

Being a white label VOD solution, it allows you to launch a highly customizable and scalable video platform. StreamView enables you to launch your VOD business quickly with a professional website and mobile apps without putting in a hefty amount of money. Standard back end structure and powerful built-in features allow you to launch your project with ease. You get the complete source code and advanced technology for a single time payment.

StreamView allows you to create a platform that is simple and intuitive to use and can be easy for people with no advanced technical knowledge. Pre-built templates are available to display your videos, which can be customized according to your requirements. Additionally, it also provides all the above mentioned important features to deliver the best possible user experience to your customers.

Conclusion

Hope this blog has helped you figure out the best on demand video streaming platform for your requirements. To make your final choice, take advantage of the free trials to test all the features, and to see if it is compatible with your business needs. If you are looking for an enterprise video solution that matches your unique business requirements, we are here to help you. 

Key Components to Launch an OTT Platform in the US Market

Key Components to Launch an OTT Platform in the US Market

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

launch-an-OTT-plaform-Monetization-streamhash

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. 

Video-interface-and-user-engagement-streamhash

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. 

3 Things you can Learn from a Netflix Business Model

3 Things you can Learn from a Netflix Business Model

Technology has revolutionized the way things were being done in the past. Today, we are doing the same old school stuff, but through an improved and more penetrating media- The Internet. Broadcasting was a sphere traditionally dominated by the Cable TV and direct to home TV services. However, now it has stretched to a broader audience through live streaming and video-on-demand services.

Any discussion about VOD services cannot close without talking about how Netflix has emerged as an unprecedented supplier of videos from a number of niches. Started with broadcasting popular Hollywood movies and re-broadcasting TV episodes, Netflix ultimately becomes an original content producer and given mankind the awesome content like “Stranger Things” “House of Cards”, “Narcos” and recently the very popular “Mowgli: legend of the jungle”. These are just a glance at how Netflix has nailed the business model of streaming services in 2019.

Is awesome content the only reason for this massive leap by Netflix? I don’t think so. It is one of the reasons but not the sole one for sure. There are numerous other platforms with great content, but not all are as successful like this particular giant. I think the best ingredient in this recipe of success was the business model of Netflix.

How? This article aims at explaining the same. Meanwhile, we would also be explaining other things that video streaming services must learn from the Netflix business model. So let’s first understand the same.

1. Netflix Nailed the SVOD business model | subscription plans

So how Netflix makes money? Netflix makes use of one of the most stressful streaming business models- subscription model (SVOD). No doubt, they chose the trickiest path what others are afraid of doing. When most of the video streaming service is operating on the freemium model, Netflix business plan was to stick strictly to the paid-only access. Its only method of earning from the content consumers is to ask for a monthly membership.

After Netflix, SVOD has become a common streaming business model for every new entrant in the market these days.  

How does it work?

Like Netflix revenue model, a pure subscription-based business plan asks users to subscribe to a membership plan to access the content on the platform. On the other hand, the subscribed users get unlimited access to ad-free content for a monthly, quarterly or yearly period.

But Netflix found a way to sophisticate it further

Netflix business plan was not just to start a yet another subscription-based streaming service. Instead, it found a way to earn more than just usual SVOD services do. It offered the full access to all its videos with a fixed monthly cost. However, a further sophistication was made to enhance the regular SVOD experience –

Netflix classified it membership plans into three different categories, based on two aspects-

  • Different types of video resolution on different plans and,
  • Different number of allowed simultaneous logins in different plans

The two aspects offered three different sophistication on the regular video consumption experience –

  • Access to different streaming Qualities- Standard, HD, and 4K
  • Access to different levels of logins- 2, 3 and 4 users

Users are allowed to subscribe to any of the following three plans and get the corresponding benefits

  • Basic – offered standard video quality for streaming and maximum of one user only.
  • Standard – offered HD video quality streaming with a maximum of two user logins at the same time on different devices.
  • Premium – Offered 4K video streaming with a maximum of four simultaneous logins at a time on different devices.

2. Netflix made costly plans affordably

If you look at the membership plans, they are quite expensive. The base plan comes $7.99/month. This is quite a cost. However, a closer digging would reveal that these plans made Netflix successful without saddling the prices on the subscribers.

For instance, consider the most expensive plan of Netflix, which comes $11.99/month. I seem to like the costliest plan, but in the actual scenario is the cheapest one. It allows a user to add four different user profiles, and let them log in on different devices at the same time. Now, you can ask three of your other friends to share the subscription cost and get the costliest plan at the cheapest rate.

Bottom line: Netflix nailed the trickiest video streaming business model into the most rewarding one.  Other business must learn that adopting a business model is not enough. They would need to consider the scenarios where they can re-shape the existing models into rewarding options for both the parties. In fact, considering your customers’ preferences would help you maximize the earnings without looking like doing so.  

3. Netflix pioneered the cross-platform content delivery

Tell me a video streaming medium where Netflix does not work. Take the popular mediums for instance- TV, Laptop, Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet-

Does Netflix let you watch your favorite movies on each of these platforms?

Does Netflix let you synchronize your user account on each of these platforms?

Does Netflix have an optimized user interface or application for each of these platforms?

Off course yes! This is yet another factor that made Netflix so popular among the content consumers from all the platforms. In fact, its optimized applications for different modern-day televisions were the sole reason why many people today spend most of the time watching Netflix on TV rather than the regular broadcasted content on Cable TV. 

Today, Netflix lets you stream your favorite content from all sort of modern day devices and platforms like –

  • WebRTC for internet browsers
  • iOS Mobile
  • iOS Tablet
  • Android Mobile
  • Android tablet
  • Android TV
  • Apple TV
  • Roku TV and many more

Bottom Line: If you want to launch a successful business like Netflix, it is wise to make it accessible to all the prospects from all the possible platforms. In a world where there is an internet-based alternative available for everything, video streaming service could be a great success by opening every possible entrance to it for the common users.

Bonus takeaways from Netflix Business strategy

In addition to the above three major takeaways, I would love to mention the following lessons that I learned from the Netflix business plan-

  • Happy customers make happy businesses

Despite offering one of the most expensive membership plans in the streaming industry, Netflix nailed the revenue by emphasizing on building long term relationships. Instead of selling once and forgetting the rest, Netflix subscription model also invests a fortune in their customer service. The free trial without any commitment is one such example of the same. It lets the consumers try out the service for free and then chose to continue or discontinue the same. This trial alone is enough to encourage the consumers in Netflix’s service quality.

  • Content marketing is still the king

Despite receiving a huge word of mouth popularity, Netflix still never fails on the content marketing part. From strategy planning, content development, to content promotion, Netflix content marketing strategies are indeed inspiring. It may sound old-school, but considering the amount of thin content on the internet, it is overwhelming that Netflix still believes in engaging customers with a content marketing strategy. Regular Blog posts, behind the scene leaks, social media posts to YouTube marketing, one can easily find a Netflix content on each of the popular platforms. In fact, the regular social media posts help the company to get many discontinued subscribers back through the popular memes and posts originating from time to time.

Just check out how the recent Netflix movie “Bird Box” broke the records by getting views from more than 45 million user account in just 7 days. Many experts might say that Netflix does not need memes to get views, but memes professionals will never let the opportunities slip from their hands. This is what that happened for this particular movie. Memes started flowing all over the internet, encouraging many others to watch the movie just to know what this fuss is all about.

Subscription-based models are the future

Not just for video streaming, but subscription-based businesses are booming equally in all sort of niches. Today, there are service providers for renting you a range of products like furniture, clothes, electronics, vehicles, and even jewelry. Even economic slowdown cannot force many such businesses to step back. During the economic downturn, people would love to prefer these subscription businesses. It is a wise way to prevent the upfront in buying when people can simply subscribe to one when in need and then discontinue it when not needed. Netflix’s subscribe or unsubscribe anytime approach lets it earns by billing lesser yet recurring amounts instead of asking for the high upfront cost. SVOD is a futuristic idea. No doubt it is expected to capture a gross market of $100 billion by the end of 2020. 

[su_button url=”https://streamhash.com/contact/” target=”blank” style=”stroked” background=”#079528″ size=”6″]Contact Us For More Ideas[/su_button]

Hulu Business Model and How Does Hulu Make Money?

Hulu Business Model and How Does Hulu Make Money?

Hulu presently has an incomparable number of subscribers which is more than a colossal number of 10 million. Survey’s by Hulu’s official website states that video content of more than 700 million hours has been streamed by Hulu till date. Most of the flicks on Hulu, be it movies or TV series can be relished for free.

It is interesting to understand that even if Hulu is streaming movies for free how does Hulu make money?

Hulu had never struggled even during its initial phases. With partners like NBC and Fox, Hulu launched its platform officially in 2007 i.e. 10 years ago. Not only was Hulu backed by enormous brands such as Fox but also it had an inventory of shows such as The Office and others which weren’t aired anymore on local TV sets.

The Hulu business model primarily made up of certain notable specks. Let us discuss the layout of one of the best streaming services on the planet at the moment.

  • Hulu has two different clans of customers including the ones who use Video on Demand streaming and others are advertisers who have partnered with Hulu. These advertisers sum up to a huge number of 1700.
  • Hulu offers clients legitimate access to an extensive variety of premium content for nothing out of pocket. Hulu also partners with different TV service providers to make TV shows accessible inside 24 hours or less or their actual broadcast time.
  • Hulu makes an incentive for sponsors by offering barely focused high-performing advertisement and profoundly personalized benefit. The organization continues improving in the ways advertisements and endorsements are conveyed to viewers.
  • Hulu licenses content from broadcast and cable network service providers. Hulu loads advertisements from its sponsors each time a client asks for a video. These advertisements incorporate short video spots that pursue just before the onset of the video, and amid the video’s normal commercial breaks. Each benefactor additionally contributes promotional banners, fliers and video overlays, which are shown with the video and connected to the sponsor’s site. Hulu offers its benefactors an entire list of these and other advertisement designs in its media kit.
  • Various associations using primarily this adjustment framework are stages, which practice, as it were in customer created content or non-premium content, which is similarly, supported by sponsors, for instance, Facebook and Youtube. Additionally, Hulu gets a motivation by charging a $7.99 participation cost to customers for the features of Hulu Plus. However, as of now Hulu does not use value differentiation for its customers. Immediately, Hulu gets a proper payment through business income. It is also assisted by more than 1700 marketing experts. Despite the fact that generally sponsors are charged when an advertisement begins to play, Hulu just charges when their promotions are taken towards fulfillment.

How does Hulu make money?

Hulu licenses video content from more than 200 providers. It streams this material over the Net, through its servers and wrapped in its own UI. The streams are joined by advertisement replacements, and Hulu and its sponsors generate revenues that rely upon what number of views the content gets.

Hulu has also initiated Live TV streaming in the year 2016.

This isn’t too far away from how some conventional TV stations function, however clearly Hulu’s “screen” isn’t really a TV, and the same authorized content can be served up in a different number of approaches to make maximum profit from minimal investment cost.

As of late Hulu’s been developing new technologies, and offering a Hulu-Plus bundle over its fundamental service. Clients pay a month to month membership charge for finish seasons of TV series. Hulu-Plus also is supported by ads just like Hulu. To the extent Hulu is concerned, having the consistent and solid income from a group of subscribers is useful for its long term strategies to achieve success.

Let us imagine that Hulu’s staff costs it $35 million taking up costs of all the things. This leaves it some $40 million to $70 million to cover server costs and also normal business expenses. The math could then effortlessly bring about zero profit or a net loss for Hulu, depending upon this reasoning.

Notwithstanding the complex forward and backward of revenue that results from shared income on promotional impressions, the general outcome is certain for Hulu. The principle purpose behind this is the content sponsors bear the expenses for a portion of the ads– leaving Hulu’s share of the income as a benefit.

Also, in spite of the fact that the content sponsor bears that additional cost, they get a greater lump of the raw or primary income. Furthermore, the system burden of serving the ads is effortlessly carried and delivered by their existing gigantic server framework.

The Hulu business model basically has the business objective of converting the regular viewers into registered users. Such an initiative would generate commendable revenue at the end of the process. Even if your customers are not watching video content every day on Hulu, still the subscription plan would generate a healthy income.

Hulu and Hulu Plus also make a lot of money from endorsements. Ones who are paying a daily subscription fee use the service on a daily basis, increasing revenue generated by advertisements. However, Hulu Plus subscribers have to bear lesser ads since they are paying more for their subscriptions.

Basically, Hulu makes money by making its subscribers and users view abundant advertisements while streaming TV shows and movies. The regular update of the Hulu archive urges its customers to register with a premium account.

On ending lines, it must be mentioned that the hulu business model is less about broadcasting futuristic TV experiences for users. However, its main focus is to be a money castle ably distributing cash to the producers of TV shows. Research commenced by Adage states that Hulu serves way more advertisements than what YouTube does.

Give yourself a second thought to find out whether Hulu generates better revenue than YouTube and all other platforms available. Try Hulu as your personal video streaming platform and get the answers yourself.

Digital Encryption & Compression Techniques You Should Know for Netflix like Website

Digital Encryption & Compression Techniques You Should Know for Netflix like Website

Irritating delays in your live streaming motion picture will turn out to be less frequent, on the account of a brand new plan being commenced by Netflix.

It is independently utilizing manmade brainpower systems to break down each shot in a video and pack it without influencing the picture quality and also lessening the measure of information it employs. The new encoding strategy is gone for the developing cult of viewers in rising economies who watch video on cell-phones and tablets.

According to Todd Yellin, the Vice President of Netflix’s innovation team we humans are oversensitive about the buffering issue. He further states that nobody needs to be obstructed amidst Bojack Horseman or Stranger Things.

Yellin trusts the new framework, called Dynamic Optimizer, will keep those Netflix valleys free of interference when it is presented at some point in the next two of months. He was exhibiting the framework’s outcomes at “Netflix House,” a chateau in the slopes sitting above Barcelona that the organization has furnished for the Mobile World Congress public expo.

Each and every video streaming business utilizes compression techniques. Without compressing, the video is actually a sum of dynamic pictures, with each single casing a full photograph in itself. The repetition in various casings is recognized by the compression technique. A full casing is being held back, called a key frame. Different casings are held from this edge, and are either the P-outline or the B-outline.

The procedure of compression is called encoding. H.264 and WebM are two of the most predominant compression benchmarks. Video Streaming applications regularly bundle pictures into various bitrates and diverse compression guidelines.

Netflix is an organization which encodes their motion pictures as well. This is on the grounds that uncorrupted streaming is generally a basic prerequisite for inspiring licenses to content from copyright holders. Without encryption you are adequately forgetting your substance and keeping it out there for anyone to download and share unlawfully. While truly most substance on Netflix is stolen and made accessible on downpour locales by and by, the procedure of encryption makes video theft a significantly more complicated process. Clients normally favor the general involvement of Netflix over the complex procedure of getting a stolen duplicate.

Businesses like StreamView offer scrambled video streaming administration to independent film makers and organizations. StreamView handles both video compression and encryption, to enable video creators to concentrate on formulating their substance without being afraid of the fact that there might be depreciation in the revenue generated.

Related Content – StreamView to stimulate Netflix business model

MP4 is without a doubt the most well known video arrangement format during modern times, since it permits a blend of sound, video, subtitles and pictures to be retained in the one single record. Besides, it can be played on nearly all the gadgets, leaving different configurations like AVI, WMV, MOV a long way behind; it can be shared on numerous online video locales like YouTube. It is compacted with MPEG-4 video encoding and AAC sound compression.

H.264, right now one of the often utilized video codec, is a mainstream compressor for high definition videos. Since H.264 can accomplish fantastic video in generally low bitrates, it’s ordinarily utilized as a part of AVCHD camcorders, HDTV, Blu-ray, and HD DVD. MP4 (.mp4) is also one of the video formats encoded by H.264.

H.264 is one codec which has further developed compression strategies than the usually incorporated MPEG-4 compression. One of the benefits of H.264 is the superior compression rate. It is approximately 1.5 – 2x more effective than MPEG-4 encoding.

So the two principal focal points of H.264 over MPEG-4 pressure are smaller content size and better video quality for constant playback.

AES is the short form for Advanced Encryption Standard and isn’t constrained to video content, as it likewise works for media communications, banking, and government correspondences. This works fine with the different video streaming conventions, for example, HLS, Smooth Streaming, and MPEG-DASH.

However, Microsoft PlayReady is a broad, studio affirmed encoding innovation that shields your substance from infringement, and it is upheld on an extensive variety of the most mainstream gadgets today. Presently, you can utilize PlayReady to secure both Video-on-demands and live streams.

In one case, the picture quality from 555 kilobits for each second (kbps) stream seemed to be indistinguishable to one on an information interface with a large portion of the bandwidth. For another situation, a “Stranger Things” stream seemed inconsistent and misshaped on a 100 kbps stream; however, with Dynamic Optimizer, its quality enhanced significantly.

That is significantly coarser than the contemporary method for online video encryption, which is to encode the content within the bounds of a particular broadcast speed. This signifies that even if the video is compressed, still with a low network speed the images may be pixilated and grainy.

Let’s take a look at a major supplier like Comcast, who claims the Xfinity on-demand catalog strategy for encoding the online streaming video, which is to pack it all consistently for a specific internet speed.

When you sign into your record, Comcast would provide you with a token, which says your identity, and which organizations you have gathered benefits to get to. As soon as you would tap on that “Play” button, that token is passed to the video feature, which airs it out, thoroughly checks your authorizations, and pronounces the reality whether you would be able to see this substance or not.

Related content – Learn how to start a streaming service like Netflix

Ever endeavored to watch a video at an online source like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon and it says that you don’t have the right to approach it and need to reinstate your membership? Well they are doing that with an encryption standard to secure those benefits.

They can regularly accomplish this with token passing, which is a scrambled question that outlines to the application or video whatever you approach, and this is labeled as “benefits” or Digital Rights Management. You would easily figure out how to unearth a Digital Rights Management blunder on Netflix today.

Netflix incorporates both encryption/compression and DRM. Netflix, being one of the most saluted video streaming organizations in the world at the moment has its priority based on the fact of content protection. There are different ways as to how Netflix would safeguard their content using Fairplay for iOS platforms, Playready for Microsoft and Widewine for Android stages.

Thus Digital Encryption and Compression both are important while commencing a video over Netflix. With this article, one thing has been made clear which says that privacy and security are the two most crucial and relevant specks during the advent of any business over any platform.