The greatest secret of a successful video streaming business lies in its business model. A company’s revenue model is the way it makes money. When choosing a revenue model, most businesses wait until the very end of development and simply look at what industry leaders are doing, altering it slightly. But when considered carefully the revenue model can be a very powerful tool and it is highly important to shape it according to your business needs. If you want to create your own Netflix, you must choose the revenue strategy that compliments your streaming business.
Netflix’s annual revenue in 2018 has hit $15.8 billion continuing to secure the impressive figures Netflix enjoyed over the last decade. By the last quarter of 2019, Netflix generated total revenue of $5.2 billion which is over $1 billion up from what it earned in the corresponding quarter of 2018.
If you are looking to find out how to start a video on demand website, we will be briefing it in this blog. The business model of Netflix, popular revenue models to follow, costs involved in creating your own Netflix also comes under the scope of this blog. Let’s get started.
Netflix Business Model
What Netflix succeeds at is known as video on demand, by allowing users to access content like TV shows, movies, and other series instantly through Internet-connected devices like PC, laptop, tablets, smartphones, over the top box connected TV, Internet-connected TV, etc.
This video streaming on demand giant operates on a subscription-based revenue model where users pay for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription plan and gain access to streaming movies, shows, originals and other content available on Netflix in the Standard Definition (SD), High Definition (HD) and Ultra HD quality based on what they pay for.
The primary revenue source for Netflix is subscriptions. That is, users pay to access content on Netflix and that is how the company makes money. Learning more about the Netflix business model will significantly help you in choosing the best revenue model for your VOD business. Netflix offers 3 different plans for users based on the streaming quality of the content provided.
Basic– This plan offers access to content in SD quality.
Standard– This plan offers HD content access to subscribers.
Premium– This plan allows users to access videos in ultra HD quality.
Popular Video-on-Demand Revenue Models
The very first step of learning how to start a streaming service like Netflix is to choose the right monetization model for your VOD platform. What is the best way to charge users to access your content? In this blog, we are going to break down common VOD revenue models so that it becomes easy for you to choose the best one that suits you. Let’s get started.
Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD)
The subscription video on demand business model is the one that allows users to access an entire library of videos for a recurring fee. This fee may be charged weekly, monthly or even annually. Once a user subscribes to the service, they can watch as many videos as they want until the subscription period ends. Netflix follows this model to monetize its services. Subscriptions are auto-renewable and users have the flexibility to cancel them anytime. This model suits platforms that have a huge variety of entertainment content like movies, TV shows, drama series, TV programs, etc. to engage their audience on a long term basis.
Pros
One of the biggest advantages of SVOD is the recurring revenue stream that ensures a steady income every month. It also gives you the chance to upsell your users to bigger packages getting more money for your business.
Cons
While SVOD offers great chances to upsell, it becomes hard to upsell from a cancellation. That means once a subscriber cancels the plan, it can be difficult to bring them back to your platform.
Advertisement Video On Demand (AVOD)
Advertisement VOD is the business model where viewers are allowed to watch videos for free but they must watch advertisements at different points throughout the length of the video. Ads are powerful and advertisers generally pay huge amounts for streaming their ads on your video on demand platform. You can also choose your ad pricing depending on your platform’s popularity and the type of content to be chosen for the ad.
If you are just thinking about how to start a streaming service, it is recommended to design your services based on the ad-based business model. As your VOD platform gains more users, you can expand to other monetization models eventually.
VOD ads are broadly categorized into pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll ads. As the name suggests pre-roll ads refer to the ones that play at the beginning of a video. Whereas, mid-rolls play ads in the middle of a video and post-rolls play ads at the end of a video. These ads are generally skippable or non-skippable in nature depending on how the ad network chooses to keep them. YouTube works primarily based on this revenue model.
Pros
AVOD works the best if you are new to the business as it brings in additional revenue with very little investment of your money and effort. This is one of the most common and easy ways to generate passive income.
Cons
As ads are everywhere online, too many of them can annoy your viewers.
Transactional Video On Demand
The transactional VOD business model allows you to buy content on a pay per view basis. It is exactly the opposite of what SVOD is. Instead of paying for the entire content, viewers are required to pay for only the content they want to view, buying a piece of individual content also facilitates users to keep it with themselves either on your VOD platform or download to their personal devices. Alternatively, TVOD can also allow users to rent a piece of content from a video streaming platform for a period of time and once the period expires, they will not be able to access the same content again. The transactional model works with live programming where users purchase a particular piece of content to view it. WWE streaming service is an example.
Pros
In TVOD, there is no confusion in understanding what your users prefer. You can easily understand whether there is a great demand for a particular video or a type of content. It also brings in better revenue opportunities for new content releases.
Cons
In the TVOD model, user retention is a common problem as users have a tendency to pay for particular content and then go off the platform. For the same reasons, it is difficult to push users to purchase new content.
Hybrid Video-On-Demand Model
When you have a vast library of videos and your platform is getting popular day by day, you can implement a hybrid of different revenue strategies to monetize your videos. You can choose a hybrid of AVOD, SVOD, TVOD, or any combination that works for you. If your audience base is deferred and you want different monetization models to target to suit the needs of different types of audiences, it is best to opt for a hybrid VOD model. You might have a large set of audience who don’t want to pay for accessing content but won’t mind watching ads in between and vice versa. YouTube is one of the best examples of a Hybrid VOD platform. It doesn’t just rely on advertisements to monetize. YouTube Premium is an example.
Is SVOD the Best VOD Model to Make Money?
Subscription video on demand is the most common type of VOD service offered by streaming platforms. In 2017, 55% of Americans were using Netflix and 31 % were using Amazon Prime video service.By 2022, it is estimated that over 568.4 million users would be using these platforms. While SVOD is not the only realm of streaming giants like Amazon, Hulu, and YouTube, many new VOD businesses are using subscription models to grow their income and audience.
If you are looking for different ways on how to start a company like Netflix, it is not mandatory to follow the exact path of Netflix. Choosing the revenue model that suits your business and your target audience is the ideal way to go for it. Next, let’s look into the popular revenue models in the market and understand what suits your business the best.
Costs Involved in Running a Streaming Business
The question of how to make money using a live streaming app and how much you can make cannot be answered without learning about the cost of expenses and expenditure a streaming business has to incur to get these profits.
Licensing Cost
To stream popular shows and movies in a legal manner, video streaming websites have to bear a cost to license and acquire content which differs for different types of content. For instance, Netflix reportedly paid $100 million to keep the popular series “Friends” on its service for 2019, almost three more than its previous licensing fee of $30 million.
Production Cost
Unless you are planning to acquire content from content creators, you have to bear production costs for creating your own originals. Offering original series is a great way to evade licensing costs and offer exclusive content to your users. However, the production costs can go higher when producing your own content.
Marketing Costs
Once your platform is up and running on the internet, you have to compete with N number of streaming platforms including giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. Beating the competition involves a lot of marketing expenditure. Marketing costs primarily including the expense for advertisements, payments to affiliates and device partners, and the trial month fee of every user.
Research and Development Cost
Every popular streaming website invests in the research and development department. For example, Netflix focuses a lot on research and development and that is one of the reasons why they are pioneers in the market with just a subscription-based business model.
Technology and Development Cost
From the moment you create a movie streaming website and have users visiting your site, you must ensure a seamless and lag-free viewing experience to all of them. Netflix has partnered with hundreds of Internet service providers to localize a substantial amount of traffic. Technology and development costs make up a major portion of the overall cost you have to bear.
It also includes streaming delivery technology costs and the costs involved in designing new applications and other infrastructural costs. Regarding the video streaming server costs of Netflix, it uses its own content delivery network (CDN) called Open Connect, but also depends on the service of top tier CDN Akamai. Data is stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) where terabytes of storage can be deployed to a thousand servers quickly. It is important to leverage the services of a good content delivery network even if you are not planning on growing fast because you are eventually going to scale.
CDN offers guaranteed delivery of content to users through a geographically distributed network of servers. It transforms your streaming website into a scalable system to meet any major viewership spike in demand for your content.
General and Administrative Costs
These costs include the payroll and other expenses on the human resources of the business as well and the partnership fee needed for the administrative purposes of the company.
Miscellaneous Fee
Besides all of these costs, there can be other miscellaneous costs like payment processing fees.
How To Price Your Content The Right Way?
Behind any successful revenue model stands a well-designed pricing scheme. It is one of the most critical elements of any business strategy, especially for SVOD services. If you are looking for how to make a movie website like Netflix, pricing your content is one of the important aspects to consider.
Pricing video will always be a work in progress and with the constant changes in the market, you need to experiment with different approaches. You will get to know your customers and their spending habits as time goes by. To help you with this, here are some tips to choose the right pricing scheme.
Consider Value and Customer Satisfaction
Building a pricing model based on the value and customer satisfaction will help you make your VOD platform as sustainable as possible. Additionally, offer your users enough choices that will help you to retain existing users while attracting a new audience. Approaches including tiered pricing, freemium, or consumption-based pricing will help your viewers commit to a plan that suits their personal preferences and needs.
Analyze Your Revenue Goals
It is significant to understand how much would your video on demand business be making in monthly revenue. Make sure to include overhead costs to your goal.
Consider The Size of Existing Followers
Once you have created a movie streaming website and gathered in a few users, analyze the size of your audience. How big is your current audience and measure the number of followers you have on social media? How many contacts you have on your email list.
For this formula, use the total number of followers from each individual platform. Your existing audience or the ones you are currently not monetizing is the main revenue potential you are going to focus on as they are our biggest supporters.
Start With A Low Price Window
If it’s your first time monetizing your services, aim for a low pricing formula. The most successful customers offer monthly subscription prices anywhere between $2-$50.
Industry and Genre Must Be Considered
The nature of your content will have a direct impact on how you price your content. The best thing is to start with basic market research to see what other subscription video services with niche similar to you are charging their customers. If you are planning to charge higher than your biggest direct competitor, you must be sure that your services are with a significant difference and offer more value to your users in terms of the quality of services. The next thing to consider is your Content type and genre. Each type of content has an industry price average that you must consider unless you offer content that’s obviously more valuable.
Niche and Specificity Matters
Niche content or micro-niche content to be specific is valued high due to its ideal audience. While small and limited, if a service is very focused on a particular niche, users usually won’t mind paying for that extra bit.
How to Start a Streaming Service Like Netflix?
You are on the right track of building a streaming solution to create a movie streaming website customized according to the preferences of your audience. The goal is to delight media consumers and ensure all-time technology support to keep your users happy at all stages.
To build a fully functional streaming website to cater to your global audience, it is best to choose Netflix clone open-source that comes equipped with all the essential features and functionalities. Clone scripts are readymade website script that comes equipped with powerful admin dashboard, web app integration options, Android and iOS native apps to get started in the video streaming industry.
You can choose the best video on demand platform providers to build your VOD platform who will customize their solution to match your preferences and business goals including the revenue model suited for your business.
Choosing A Revenue Model For Your Business
In an increasingly complex digital world. You can build profitable video on demand business by choosing the best revenue models that generate more money than you could ever think. The secret is to find the business model that serves both your customer’s needs and your business goals. Some of the best in the world are listed above and you need to pick the one that suits your requirements. We understand how difficult it gets while choosing the right revenue model when creating your own Netflix and the doubts that come bundled with it which is why we help consult on you the same. Get in touch with us now.
Live video streaming has come a long way from the old times when transferring video over the Internet was not even possible. Today, individuals and businesses across the world use live streaming as a tool for communication and marketing, as well as modern means of offering entertaining content to the audience.
The advancements in cloud computing have revolutionized live streaming and brought in the emergence of massive corporations and popular live streaming platforms. When you analyze in-depth, live streaming and the cloud network share a symbiotic relationship. One will not expand without the other growing. The increasing demand for live streaming has grown rapidly and the cloud business has also experienced a stable growth curve.
In the past live streaming was limited to traditional TV broadcast networks. However, today with the expansion of cloud networks, anyone can stream a quality video that is close to the broadcast networks. The increasing demand for live streaming will require cloud technology to expand at a rapid rate to meet this rising demand.
Benefits of Live Streaming For Your Business
Undoubtedly live streaming presents a brand new way of digital communication, content consumption, and promotion. Beyond the growth of the audience hooked to live content, live streaming presents a great way to drive revenue for businesses. Streaming live videos to your customer base may sound like a fun and easy thing to do. However, implementing a live streaming strategy requires careful planning to achieve your business goals. Before learning how to start a live streaming business, it is important to understand the benefits of live streaming.
Here are some of the benefits of live streaming for your business.
Low Barriers to Entry
Most of the time, all that is needed to live stream is a smartphone, an internet connection, and a social media profile. This ease of entry to leverage the potential of live streaming makes it the most effective marketing tool.
Real-Time Communication
When you conduct a live streaming event of your business, you are engaging with your audience in real-time. This gives your viewers a sense of belonging to the moment as people love being part of stories as they happen. They actively understand more about your business in a personal way and are likely to share it with their friends.
Interaction
Live streaming evokes a sense of excitement among your audience. During your live streaming, you can ask questions and connect with your audience, offer to poll, or get creative to any extent to engage them. The live streaming itself is inherently about building a community to make your customers feel inclusive and exclusive at the same time.
Cost Reduction
Some brands use live streaming as a part of their training programs, webinars, employee onboarding, or even seminars. Everyone who is physically and virtually present receives the same training simultaneously, thereby saving the company’s budget. Implementing live streaming in your business strategy can save a lot of money in the long run.
Why Is Live Streaming More Popular Than Video Streaming?
Compared to pre-recorded videos, live videos are in high demand with the younger audience. It is mainly because they feel more engaged with live content than pre-recorded content, Further, live videos are more engaging to users due to its “real” element as it is exciting to witness something that is not scripted.Statistics show that people tend to watch live videos 3 times longer than other types of videos on Facebook.
Video on demand content in many aspects is the exact opposite of live streaming content. Video on demand is a traditional system of creating and sharing content. Create a video, upload it on video sharing platforms like YouTube for the viewers to watch it, and you are good to go.
While there are some obvious benefits to video on demand like the ability to have more control over video creation and publishing, live streaming is a modern approach to the traditional way of creating video content and hence, the most preferable choice these days. But, it doesn’t mean that live streaming alone can satisfy your marketing needs. A combination of live streaming and video on demand is what your business needs.
Both have their own benefits and there is a lot you can achieve from embracing the best of both. For example, you can repurpose live content for on-demand viewing. Once the live stream is over, you can upload the videos to video-sharing platforms and make it on-demand content.
That’s not to say that live streaming doesn’t have its drawbacks. Live streaming can be more technically demanding than traditional methods when you want to add a professional edge to your live videos. It might require you to buy additional gears, capture cards, multiple card setups, and a professional live video streaming software for high-end streaming.
That’s without even mentioning the importance of upload speeds and cloud technology for live streaming. So yes, it can get demanding if you want to create a high-quality live streaming experience. However, the engagement factor is so popular today that it alone would make worthwhile to explore live streaming for your business.
Benefits of Cloud Technology For Live Streaming
The age of domestic servers has been surpassed by a quiet revolution of cloud technology. When you create a live streaming website, you have to deliver live content to a range of devices in a matter of seconds. To get things in place, you need to choose a technology to support your services. There is no one size fits all approach as every scenario comes with a unique set of requirements.
Handles Compatibility Issues and Encoding
A major advantage of using cloud technology for your live streaming service is that both encoding and device compatibility issues will be taken care of. For example, cloud services like Microsoft Azure offer a multiple platform player for displaying studio-grade encoding that is dynamically encrypted with 28 bit AES. There are no server upgrades to worry about which can free up resources as well.
Scalability
The scalability of cloud-hosted solutions for live streaming represents another major advantage of eliminating the startup costs associated with physical servers. This ensures that customers only pay for the services they are using at a given time. As the number of users increases, greater bandwidth can be allocated to offer multiple streaming simultaneously and offer buffer-free viewing on a number of output devices.
Current and Future Trends in Live Streaming
Keeping aside the ease of access, live streaming is loved by people. Live streaming is an excellent opportunity for two-way interaction with your target audience. The popularity of live streaming apps like snap chat, Periscope, Facebook live, etc. supports this idea. Here are some of the current trends in live streaming.
Social Media Dominion
We have witnessed the demand for live streaming on social media capturing significant events across the world. We are also seeing eSports live streaming constantly breaking viewership records. Live streaming services like Periscope, Snapchat, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and IGTV has skyrocketed its popularity, especially among the younger audience. Sending live videos as a method of communication with peers seems to be natural for the young generation.
Marketing Media of Choice
Live streaming video is reinventing the way brands plan their marketing strategies. Live streaming has already become an essential marketing tool that can help businesses grow. Brands are becoming more willing to invest in live streaming than ever. Reports show that 95% of businesses say that live video will be an important part of their 2020 marketing mix, with 25% stating that “live content will be a top priority, edging out the scope of pre-recorded videos. We also see businesses going live regularly on social media and their websites. Companies are getting better and better at using live video to bring down those unapproachable corporate walls, adding an authentic human interaction to the mix.
Internal Corporate Communications Booster
In business relations, brands are using live videos to strengthen their corporate culture and build solid relationships internally. Internal team meetings, employee training, etc. can be done through live videos which increases productivity and engagement. This is why Cisco acquired a video conference startup WebEx back in 2007. They successfully foresaw a future where live streaming is helping people to communicate better.
Education Empowerment
Live streaming is enhancing the way we learn. Conferences, talks, and events are being live-streamed on a regular basis. Universities like Harvard and Stanford are taking advantage of live lecture streaming. This gives their students access to knowledge anytime, anywhere, taking down barriers to education. Consequently, students who may not otherwise be present at the lecture are now able to partake.
Machine Learning In Live Streaming
Machine learning is the latest digital transformation that helps streamline and personalize the user experience for all kinds of technology. This algorithm essentially “learns” what yields a positive result and what doesn’t, and continuously improves itself based on this collected data. There are many opportunities for machine learning applications in live streaming scenarios of all sizes, including large multi-camera events, smaller single-camera live streams, and even lectures at educational institutions.
Computers will be able to learn certain cues like lighting, face and speech recognition, etc. in order to automate live switching, recording, and even adding lower thirds. For example, “smart” live video will be able to automatically start the stream when it recognizes a specific voice or person has appeared on stage. This technology can even track the presenter across the stage, keeping the focus on them. Once the stream is over, the technology can automatically generate and upload a highlight reel of the event based on cues like audience applause and lighting. The potential for AI and machine learning is huge, and there are many specific examples of how it can be applied.
Further Marketing and E-Commerce Involvement
Just like video ads before normal videos, we will also see the live video start to ingrain deeper into marketing, becoming its major tool. We will see more brands going live with their own shows, introducing their own brand ambassadors and trusted experts like the following example.
More live events will be used as “see-now-buy-now” eCommerce platforms for a live online shopping experience. As a result of frequent and intentional use in marketing, live video production will become a regular part of the marketing education curriculum. New and better tools for measuring ROI of live streaming campaigns will become available.
Purchasing Power
The revenue impact of live video cannot be ignored. Nearly half of the users say they would pay for live, exclusive on-demand video from a favorite speaker, performer, or sports team. In general, video boosts sales, as well as recognition of a brand. 64% of customers are likely to make a purchase after watching a branded social video.
Getting the Timing Right
Like with written content, length matters. Live videos up to two minutes long hold viewer’s attention, after which time there’s a drop-off. Many videos in that one-to-two-minute-long duration are explainer videos, which tell about a product or service and helps consumers understand the company better. The zone where you don’t want to be is between two to six minutes long. Attention span and time spent on videos picks back up again for those that are between six and 12 minutes long.
Of course, this timing is for video in general. The rules change a little when it comes to live videos, streaming videos which are often sporting games, events, television shows, movies and the like. With this type of watching, viewers will often spend up to several hours watching their favorite team play or binge-watching a favorite show.
For social videos, the rules are a bit different. Here’s the breakdown by the platform.
Facebook– While there is no minimum time for the length of a Facebook Live video, but it’s best if your stream is at least 10-15 minutes long. Facebook itself states that longer broadcasts attract more viewers, as more people have a chance to learn about the broadcast and tell their friends. Engagement on Facebook Live streams keeps increasing until about the 15-minute mark, then remains fairly stable through the maximum length of four hours.
Instagram– The ideal length is under 30 seconds for a regular video post and 15 seconds for a Story. For IG Live, it can go up to one hour.
YouTube– The average length of the top 100 most-watched videos on the platform is between five and seven minutes.
Video customer support
Live Q&A sessions as a way to receive help immediately and from real, knowledgeable people will become more and more widespread. Similarly, to current over-the-phone customer support, live video customer support centers will emerge. Receiving support with real-time visual aids will help solve issues faster.
Live streaming and cloud
Live streaming solutions have adopted cloud scaling to enable larger bandwidth and better speeds. As live streaming happens in real-time, it can’t be repeated. Hence it needs to get right the first time itself. The factors like speed and bandwidth are necessary to handle heavier video requirements and offer a better viewing experience to the audience.
These days, even small businesses leverage live streaming o bring their customers close to their brand and make them feel more connected. These interactions help in taking their marketing strategies to the next level.
However, it also comes with the transmission of large data that results in latency issues. By scaling on the cloud, live streaming platforms can increase their bandwidth to offer better streaming performance and viewing experience. While CDNs handle that part efficiently, many businesses don’t have access to it to handle the heavy traffic and hence cloud scaling is very important.
Cloud technology also offers live streaming platforms a cost-effective, flexible, and secure solution for setting up their workflow. This serves to meet the requirements for both live streaming and video on demand services.
Let’s understand this with an example. During a live broadcast of a sports event, the traffic is easily 10 times or even more than on normal days. Provisioning for servers and other infrastructure will end up creating a large up-front cost for infrastructure which otherwise won’t be utilized in normal scenarios. The cloud technology with its pay-per-use strategy serves as an ideal solution for live streaming platforms with an effective costing method at a very high rate of security, scalability, and reliability.
A typical End-To-End functional workflow for cloud-based live streaming looks like the following.
Production
The production process begins with the acquisition of the camera feed. In the case of live streaming, the camera feed may be backhauled to a central production faculty via a dedicated Internet connection.
Ingestion
In live streaming, the camera feed is directly connected to the cloud-based live streaming solution. As opposed to video on demand content where the content is uploaded via a CMS.
Monitoring
Any disruption in the ingestion process during live streaming will directly impact the viewing experience. For the automated workflow running in the cloud, you need a way to identify any failure and report it. This is where monitoring will help to ensure that everything is running as expected.
Encoding
If you are looking for different ways on how to create a live streaming website, you have to be mindful of the various different platforms and devices on which your content will be played. The streams uploaded to the cloud will be of one format and specification. For your live videos to be played across different devices like smartphones, tablets, desktops, and smart-TV’s, the video must be converted to different formats and specifications. This process of conversion is called encoding and is an intense concept.
Ad-Insertion
To make money out of your live streams, it is important to insert monetization channels to your live streams. You can either offer your live content to your audience for a fee or offer it without any fee, but insert ads in between the broadcast. If you are using an advertisement based monetization method for your live streams, you need to insert it along with the process of encoding to serve as a reference point to display ads during playback.
Protection
The major challenge with live streaming or any digital video playback is content protection, especially if you follow a pay-per-view or subscription-based business model. If your business involves the scenario of piracy prevention and revenue generation, it is highly important to protect your content. Some aspects of content protection are authentication and authorization. Choose a secure cloud technology that adheres to digital rights management to encrypt the content. These security measures restrict viewing or copying of content by unauthorized parties.
Delivery
Besides understanding how to start a live streaming business, you must also learn in-depth about how to deliver content without any potential delays. This is where CDN’s come into play. Content delivery networks with their vast networks of servers spread across several locations offer web acceleration by serving users with a cached version of the live stream requested. Hence, it is highly important to choose live streaming solutions with in-built CDN’S to optimize the delivery of live videos with low latency, high speed, and low packet loss.
This is how a sample cloud-based workflow based on Microsoft Azure’s media service looks like.
Live streaming offers a great opportunity to reach out to a broader audience and is spurred to be on a positive growth trajectory with improving mobile broadband connectivity and increased Internet penetration. Demand for live videos is expected to rise along with cloud technology. Ensuring a smooth and swift playback experience across different platforms under different network conditions is a challenging task bringing some of the best cloud technologies to work together. A cloud-based workflow for live streaming is proving to be the core of building a scalable, reliable, extensible and robust live streaming platform.
Live streaming is no longer a novelty for marketers. With real-time videos becoming prominent among social media users, we have seen a significant leap in the way businesses usually interact with their target audiences these days. Live video, as a part of the video marketing strategy, is becoming popular, and it is going to stay as a trend in 2020, as well.
Did you know that online viewers spend 3X more time watching a Facebook live video as compared to other types of videos? The concept of live streaming is evolving and the number of brands using it to strengthen their relationships with the customers is increasing, too.
Live streaming is gradually taking a leading place as one of the most powerful marketing tools for individuals and businesses. With its rising significance, questions like how to build a live streaming website, how much it takes to stream live videos, etc. have become some prominent undertakings among the businesses these days.
Live videos can either make or break your marketing campaigns; it’s a fact that all marketers agree with. However, you must be thoughtful to show your audience the real side of your business and offer something of great value. Live streaming can bring in more leads, conversions, and overall ROI. If you are looking for ins and outs of how to start a live streaming business, you should focus on the utility of live streaming first.
Why Live Videos For Marketing?
Businesses can stream live videos over multiple social media channelslike Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, at the same time. They can also use this opportunity to sell their products by allowing viewers to purchase products directly with just a button click while watching the live videos. Let’s take a closer look at what else makes live streaming a popular marketing tool.
No Investment Required
One of the biggest advantages of live video streaming is it’s available to anybody with a very little investment. Compared to earlier days, when live streaming setups were expensive affairs and were accessible only to the rich brands, we now have some much cheaper alternatives for everyone. The technologies we possess today to eliminate most of the expensive requirements and it has become easier for anyone to adopt live streaming in their marketing mix.
Brands can now bypass traditional live streaming methods and reach directly to their customers with live streaming through popular social media channels. However, if the brands seek a better professional solution than social media streaming, they can also create a live streaming website of their own with some minimal investment. There are tons of affordable live streaming solutions available in the market. Having a dedicated live streaming website helps indeed, as it not only opens up the immense opportunities but also gives greater control over the brand message they want to deliver.
The Emergence of New Business Models and Sales Channels
Brands now are shifting on influencer marketing to attract audiences and sell their products. Brands are approaching influencers with a large social following and paying them for doing sponsored streams. For instance, a fashion brand can recruit fashion bloggers for a campaign that includes live streaming of their fashion shows. Besides, these bloggers can put product links on the live screen and let viewers purchase the outfits shown in the show instantly. With the rising popularity and adoption of live streaming by the brands, new business models and many such effective sales channels are emerging.
Possibilities For Brands to Create New Expanded Experiences
Live streaming brings new business opportunities for brands. They can create a more integrated brand experience for customers where an immediate channel of communication will make sure the messages flow seamlessly in both directions. For instance, sports brands can sell their products to fans who are not physically present at a game but watching the same through live streaming.
What Does It Mean For Marketers?
As it becomes competitive for brands to win customers on social media, combining both social media campaigns and paid promotions can offer an enhanced level of engagement with the audience. Live video streaming combines all of these elements into a new kind of medium with endless possibilities. By putting the capabilities of live TV into everyone’s hands, brands can deliver trust factors in a way we have not yet seen. However, we are still in the early days of adoption and are just starting to visualize the possibilities.
Power of Live Streaming For Marketers and Brands
You already know that live streaming helps brands connect with their audience more realistically. It also allows the audience to participate in a brand’s storytelling. No matter if you are a video content creator or a business, you can leverage the benefits of live streaming and deliver your brand message to the prospects in innovative ways. Let’s see different ways you can use to leverage live streaming for your brand-
Engaging Content
Live videos are a great alternative to static visual content. Over 80% of online viewers would watch live videos than exploring other types of content. As video content is visually appealing and easier to grasp, viewers can connect with the real-time content better than any other form of content. Live video streaming offers a sense of real-time connection, which is even engaging than other content types. Allowing businesses to establish their web presence and narrate brand stories in real-time, live streaming can produce some faster results.
Better Reach
There is no doubt live streaming helps to reach out to millions of global users by just a click of a button. Using live stream, brands can broadcast their events to a wider audience, and utilize this opportunity to increase brand awareness among the new audiences as well. The ability to get in touch with as many people as possible without any physical or geographical restrictions is a true power of marketing in hands.
Enhance Customer Relationships
Live streaming ensures enhanced customer relations as they can interact with brands in real-time leading to trust and loyalty. Unlike pre-recorded videos, live videos connect with your audience in a more personal way, paving a seamless channel of communication to interact with the brands. Unrehearsed live video gives a more realistic touch to the brand messages and therefore, making it even trustworthy and relatable. It gives out a sense of value and transparency among the audience. The more customers brands, the more they are likely to undertake some business and recommended the brand to others as well.
Reinforce Brand Value
Treat live streaming as any other marketing medium. What message do you want to convey to your audience? What should be the takeaway for our audience? Use your live streams to make a good impression, show the audience your personality, without just making a big sales pitch.
Different Ways To Use Live Streaming For Video Marketing
Whether you are using social media live streaming, or wondering how to set up live streaming videos from your official website, there are easier ways to undertake both kinds of plans. Irrespective of the platform you choose, you can conduct various kinds of live events to attract more and more audience to your live streams. Let’s look into different ways your business can utilize live streaming to engage with the target customers.
Host Webinars
Leveraging the power of live streaming for educational purposes can be a powerful idea. For example, a live demo on how to use a product or service can be a very honest live presentation of skills. A live demo is a practical and trustworthy solution to offer valuable information. Take this opportunity to offer knowledge while your brand builds authority in a particular field. You can even build a good part of your business around hosting webinars.
Q & A Sessions
Host live Q&A sessions to let your viewers ask questions about your brand, product, and different services. Utilize the opportunity to have real-time conversations with your audience and dig deep into your opinions about the brand. Interaction with your audience shows that your brand supports transparency, which has a positive influence on embedding trust factors.
Try to address each question individually by mentioning usernames, as it helps to build a personal relationship with your audience. You must encourage your viewers to ask questions and put comments even if your live stream isn’t a Q&A session. These sessions hold the potential to build a strong community around your brand.
For example, Humana broadcasted a live session with chef Nino answering to the questions of viewers while cooking.
Behind the Scenes Look
Broadcasting behind the scenes is a great way to get a little personal with your audience. Live stream an event, a tour of your office, and show your audience how you make your products. Even the most routine business activity might be very interesting to people who see it for the first time.
Live streaming a business victory or a celebration is another great way to share your company culture and let your viewers feel being a part of it. You can also utilize this opportunity to offer an exclusive sneak peek of your new product development status. The insights offered through such live sessions can build a special connection with your audience and can potentially attract many viewers.
Collaborate With Influencers
Collaborating with popular influencers can have a significant impact on expanding your reach. Choose influencers who have a large following on their social media platforms and websites, and can provide some expertise in a particular area. You can invite influencers to be part of your live stream, be a guest on your live broadcasts, or you can also give them some creative freedom to create their own live sessions promoting your brand.
Alternatively, you can also allow them to take your over live sessions for a period of time and allow them to post live content directly to your page. As opposed to a produced video, live streaming is an easy, honest, and unrehearsed way of reaching out to your viewers.
When you collaborate with influencers, it must align well with your brand and be organic to your viewers. Make sure you do thorough research on your personality of choice, consider their primary demographic, hashtags they use, and overall reputation. The interest and values of the influencer’s audience must also align with your brand’s message and values, making it easy to gain their attention. This type of partnership with popular influencers improves discovery and expand the reach.
Use Live Streams for Sales
Using live broadcasts for real-time sales can create a sense of urgency to buy especially if you are offering discounts exclusively for your online viewers. Set up a live broadcast displaying your special products or services, and offer a link to buy it instantly. Keep in mind that some live chats do not allow links, so you may need to get more creative. Alternatively, you can also create your own live streaming website using a decent live streaming software solution, and get better control on putting links and promoting your products even effortlessly.
Run Contests
Running contests on your live streams has great potential to increase the reach of your live broadcast. To improve the reach, you can ask your viewers to share a link of your live stream as a part of the entry requirement to the contest. This way your viewers become an additional marketing channel.
You can also use the contest entry requirements to expand your email list by capturing email addresses using a Signup form. Conducting contests via live streams can keep your audience engaged and you can use the platform to announce the results as well. Make sure you announce it early to increase the participation of your audience.
For example, Wingstop launched the world’s first live auction on periscope and announced it in advance in their Twitter account.
Live Stream Big Events
Nowadays it is customary for a large enterprise to live-stream large events and product launches. A live launch can help your products and services stand out and create a lot of buzz and traffic around it. Consider going live with your product launch, important events, keynote presentations, demos, etc. Build up the hype around large events in advance so that your viewers have the chance to share the news till the big day.
Conduct Live Interviews
Live interviews can act as an amazing traffic source as you are addressing not just your audience but another person’s audience as well. Setting up interviews with big names in the industry can give you instant recognition and authority in your niche. This further builds trust among your viewers. As mentioned earlier, you can also interview influencers who are from the same niche to capture a wider audience. For example, Benefit Cosmetics went live with makeup master José Rivera with 13k viewers and good engagement.
Live Stream Fun Activities
Your live broadcast need not be formal content always. To change it up a bit, try broadcasting fun activities like team actions, a humorous live, DIY crafts, or anything that your audience will find interesting. For example, Twitter live-streamed holiday-themed sessions with DIY crafts, cocktail mixing, and holiday planning tips by collaborating with top influencers.
Reveal Product Announcements
This is another significant strategy that works better when you have an audience, but it can be highly effective if done right otherwise too. Your viewers will love to be a part of the exclusive group that gets first access to big reveals and launches. Give them that privilege by live streaming product announcements or any similar events. Reveal big news on a live stream to people who tune in before anyone else.
Reuse Live Streams
Once you have a whole library of great content for viewing and reuse, reuse your live stream to promote it further. Create promotional videos, highlight videos, optimize uploaded VOD streams for search engines, and do a lot with your saved content even after the live broadcast is over.
Best Practices To Succeed With Live Broadcasts
You have some ideas and a professional live streaming solution; you are all set to utilize the power of live streaming for your business. Here are some live streaming tips and best practices to help you come off professional and engaging with the first video itself.
Set Your Goals
What do you want to accomplish with live streaming, reach a global audience, highlight product features, increased brand awareness, or grow your audience? Your goals help to determine what type of live experience to create. Create new customer experiences; offer branded moments, live stream product launches, live events, or customer education. In short, set your goals and decide what you are going to show. If you are not interested in your content, chances are your audience won’t be either.
Plan, Test, and Promote
While live video streaming happens in real, it is not wrong to plan ahead. You can and you must plan in advance. Be sure to script responses to possible scenarios that can arise, plot out key moments, and decide in advance the messages to convey. For example, if you are doing Q&A sessions, prepare responses and have a team ready to moderate comments. Before you go live, test in advance and make sure the camera is steady and the voice is clear.
It is also important to promote your live sessions in advance to keep your audience tuned in. Start by announcing about your live broadcast on your website and social media channels to build anticipation.
Welcome New Viewers
When you start live streaming, welcome all your viewers to the live session. This way you establish a personal relationship with them instantly. Also, make sure you welcome new viewers. However, it is not actually practical when you have thousands of viewers. You can also group names together so that it is easy to recognize a large number of people at once.
Address Viewers by Names
People love being called by their names, especially during live streaming. Hearing their username called out while watching a live broadcast helps feel recognized and instantly connect with the brand.
Look at the Camera
Similar to pre-recorded videos where you have to look at the camera, live streaming also demands the same. Looking at the camera is equivalent to making eye contact with your viewers. Just because you can’t see your audience, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t look at them. This counts a lot when it comes to live streaming, as viewers might be offended if you don’t face them all the time.
Keep a Check on the Environment
Pick a good place with ample lighting and less noise when you go live. This is very important to the overall quality of the stream. Even a bad camera can look good to an extent with good lighting. Try hosting your videos during the daytime, preferably with light background behind you. While natural lighting is the best lighting you can get, you can also buy lights if you have to shoot videos in a dark room.
Choose the Right Platform
Selecting the right platform for your live streaming significantly affects the results you will achieve. If you take social networks, YouTube has over 3 billion searches a month and it is the second-largest search engine after Google. Facebook is already on the race to become a pioneer in this sector. On the other hand, Periscope is devoted to live broadcasts, which makes it easy for your Twitter audience to follow your live sessions.
So which one you must choose? The answer depends on your business goals and preferences of your audience. While Facebook Live offers options for more viewers, popups on their feed often distract them. Alternatively, you can also create a live streaming websiteto gain much control over your live videos.
How To Make Money Using a Live Streaming App?
We have discussed how live streaming can help with marketing campaigns and assist your brand to grow. Once you are well acquainted with how to create a live streaming website the next thing is to understand is how to monetize your live streams. Next, let’s look into some direct ways to use live videos to make money.
Pay-Per-View
The pay-per-view allows your viewers to unlock access to your individual live streams for a fee. This works great if the content is unique. If you are using custom live video streaming software to create your website, it’s more likely you will find an option to integrate pay-per-view model to start earning from your live streams. This model works best for streaming webinars, tutorials, sports events, and other events where people don’t mind purchasing tickets.
Subscriptions
Just like a pay-per-view model, subscriptions give access to all the streams at once for a specific period, instead of paying separately for each live session. Subscriptions can be quarterly, monthly, or yearly basis. You can also take advantage of the built-in subscription features that many custom video streaming software solutions offer. Besides access to live videos, monthly subscriptions can include other benefits for viewers like special badges, ability to chat and enjoy ad-free live streams.
Run Ads
Another great way to earn money using your live streaming app is by running advertisements. If you join the right live streaming platform in social networks, you can make money from ads as many businesses are still relying upon advertising bucks.
For example, Facebook live ads have benefits for both marketers running the ad campaigns and live streamers allow the ads to be shown during their broadcast. If you use live streaming software to broadcast live sessions, you can run ads in your live streams and it can be pre-roll, mid-roll, display ads, or overlay ads.
To exercise more control over the advertisements displayed during your streams you need to get into depths of how to make your own live streaming website. However, it not the best idea to have ads as the only monetization channels during live streaming.
Brand Collaborations and Sponsorships
Brand deals and sponsorships are another great way to make money using live streaming app. It works well when you have a recognizable name for yourself in the industry as brands will reach out to you with deals. If they don’t, you have to reach out to engage with businesses for sponsorships. Either way, you can make money streaming through banners ads, sponsored content, and more. While sponsoring content make sure it doesn’t appear as a sellout.
Affiliate Programs
A membership in affiliate programs will help you earn commissions every time a viewer clicks on your affiliate links and makes a purchase. Affiliate sales are not just limited to links; it can be even a coupon code that you are promoting. You can place the link or coupon code anywhere in your live stream description. While participating in affiliate programs, make sure to keep your content and the product or services you promote is relevant to the content you stream to make money using live streaming app.
Conclusion
Live streaming is a major shift in the way customers interact with business and each other., People are becoming more comfortable in getting on camera and engaging with others. This is also a great opportunity for businesses to market themselves and remain at the top of the industry. Create a plan now to include live streaming in your business marketing strategy. Capitalize on live streaming while it is still in its early development stage before all the big players gain the possible and it becomes harder to get into. If you want any assistance in creating a live streaming website, get in touch with us. We would like to help you out.
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.
