Essentials Of OTT App Development

The media & entertainment industry has always unlocked multiple profitable avenues in the past for brands to grow and drive sales. Today, over-the-top app development has taken things a notch above! They combine the massive reach of traditional pay-TV with the anytime-anywhere access & scale of the internet to launch an integrated business model for content creators, distributors and businesses worldwide.

So, if you too have been waiting to get onto this profitable bandwagon, now is the best time to take your step towards full-cycle OTT video app development. In this article, we will provide you with a complete checklist to develop & deploy a lucrative OTT app for your brand.

So let’s dive right into it!

Table of Contents:

• Why Now is the Right Time to Invest in OTT App Development?
• Who Can Make the Most of OTT Platform Development
• How To Develop an OTT Video Streaming App?
• What are the Must-Have Features of OTT Platform?
• How Much Does On-demand OTT App Development Cost?
• Why Choose Our OTT App Development Services?

OTT has emerged as an undeniable trend that can transcend beyond boundaries to reach viewers worldwide. With this, it’s time for marketers regardless of their size and location – to tap into the massive potential of OTT apps. They must align their marketing strategies with on-demand streaming to reach out to a more targeted audience and reinvent revenue models. Following are a few of the many benefits of OTT development for businesses looking to leapfrog the curve of competition:

• Increased ad-based revenue
• Augmented reach with anywhere, anytime access across devices
• Improved profit with consistently increasing subscriptions

• Marketers & Advertisers
• Content Creators
• Health & Wellness Advisories
• Personal Trainers & Coaches
• Corporate Businesses
• Educational Institutions
• Non-Profit Organizations

Developing an innovative application requires a team of highly skilled technical professionals with a deep understanding of the latest tools and technologies. However, to ensure that the solution meets your business needs, there are few steps you must consider as mentioned below:

1) Define your Niche

It’s not a walk in the park to build content for all niches and accomplish overnight success. It is vital to spend time pinpointing the right target audience before entering this vertical. This helps provide clarity on the innovation and value your app can offer for the specific niche.

2) Build Your Content Repository

Content is the soul of any such app. It is wise to design and build a content inventory keeping in mind the mood, interest and inclination of your subscribers. It is the foundation of your app that must be updated on a regular basis to stay relevant as it is the key to keep the users engaged.

3) Choose a Business Model

The next step to build the app requires you to choose the right business model. In our experience, there exist primarily four types of video streaming monetization models followed by the top media companies;

• SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand):
  Users view the entire range of your video content offering in return for a recurrent fixed called the subscription fee. Netflix, Amazon Prime are popular examples of this type of model.
• TVOD (Transactional Video on Demand):
  It is essentially a pay-per-view model, where the log-in is free but the users will have to pay to view and download a certain piece of content. Apple’s iTunes, Sky Box Office are some of the examples of this model.
• AVOD (Ad-Supported Video on Demand)
  An ad-centric digital video service model is successful for platforms with huge viewership. While access to major content is free for the users it is still advertising-driven within the content. YouTube can be considered as a good example of this type of model.
• Hybrid Models
  As the name suggests, this model is a combination of the other three business models. While creating your custom platform, you might want to address a different segment of users with some;
  • Want to access the videos for free
  • Want unlimited access to a video library
  • While few just want to pay for the content they access

  To generate high revenue from the app, you can decide the model based on your business need.

4) Go for a Video Streaming App that is Custom-made for Your Business

Building an OTT app from scratch comes at the cost of massive time and resources. So, if you want to hit the market quickly while staying within your budget, then you can consider leveraging a customizable ready framework that can quickly accommodate all your business needs and goals.

We have a robust streaming framework that includes a standardized selection of features to serve all the video engagement needs of even the most demanding industries. Based on your unique business needs, we can customize within weeks and deploy a profitable OTT solution. All this at a fraction of the cost – and faster than you can imagine!

The Pros of Leveraging a Customizable Streaming Platform

• Room to start small – Investing in OTT development can be downright costly for SMEs and startups on a tight budget. And, building an app from scratch may add up to the expenses of the technology stack, resources, timeline and other costs of executing or outsourcing the project. As opposed to that, an easy-to-customize & quick to deploy video streaming platform allows you to validate your business idea swiftly and economically.
• Faster time to market – A ready framework that can be customized to your business needs in just a few weeks enables you to start generating revenue sooner. You can publish your content quickly and monetize videos within hours of creating an account!
• Lower Upfront Cost – The biggest benefit of choosing a quick-to-customize solution is that it comes at a fraction of the cost of end-to-end ott software development!

Why Choose Our Video Streaming Platform?

Plus it comes with customization possibilities so any additional industry-specific features or integrations that you need can be easily added by our team of developers & designers.

With us, be rest assured that your project is in the hands of a partner that has the knowledge, experience and tech capability to deliver a successful video streaming platform. As an experienced OTT app development company, we have a dedicated team to help you implement a great solution – from UI/UX designers and QA specialists to analytics engineers and full-stack developers. Also, their understanding of business and technical requirements to build an app best suited for your business can help you execute the plan faster to enable your users to access the application anywhere, anytime.

Here are a few crucial factors to consider if you want to offer the best value and dominate the market.

Video Library Management

If you want to maintain 100% control of your content then you need a centralized video library that facilitates on-demand sorting & categorizing of movies, music, news and more.

Payment Gateway Integration

It is necessary to integrate a secure payment gateway in your business app for quick and easy payment processing via debit cards, credit cards, bank transfer, e-wallet apps and more.

Audience Analytics

To personalize content delivery & increase viewership, you need accurate insights into user behavior, regional preferences, ratings, run time, subscription patterns & more.

Smart Search

For enhanced user engagement, you must leverage the analytics-led search stream. It allows you to search and de­fine user preferences with accurate results & personalized recommendations.

Multi-language Support

To expand your reach beyond geographical borders, it is necessary to make the content available in a variety of language options. This is made possible with subtitles, audio description, or audio track.

Watchlist

It allows your channel subscribers to add movies, videos, TV shows and other content they wish to watch later. Custom OTT software development integrates this notification feature to remind users of their watch-later list.

Multiple Content Categorization

Help your audience find their preferred content faster with categorization across genre-based & audience-targeted content.

Easy Customization Options

Build your online streaming apps for TV, mobile & web platforms with limited coding dependency and complete personalization options.

Being a custom OTT platform development company, our proficient team possesses skills and experience in various technologies, to create a cross-platform solution that can work on Smart TVs, Roku, Mobile and tablets and even gaming consoles.

Take a look at how we helped a North American faith-focused media company modernize their VOD app with OTT capabilities to enhance the user experience & generate accurate sales insights.

Challenges

• Outdated back-end technology
• Unreliable sales data reporting
• Inconsistent content delivery

Solution

We re-engineered the VOD solution by restructuring the existing code with the PHP MVC framework. This was achieved by:

• Re-development of APIs for an uninterrupted viewing experience
• Finding & fixing potential bugs for precise capturing of data and reliable reporting
• Enabling integrations with several players to facilitate seamless delivery of episodic content across platforms

Benefits Delivered

• 2x accuracy in sales data capture
• 5x improvement in-app performance
• 30% increase in subscription renewals

The cost of developing the application of choice depends on several factors.

• Features and complexity of the app
• Size and geographic location
• Data inventory package for video content
• Total number of platforms and devices where you want to release your app
• Expected traffic management
• Streaming capabilities – live stream vs on-demand streams
• Technology stack required to develop the app
• Size of a development team with skillset
• Development Timeline

The timeline can range from 3 – 8 months for a custom solution and white-label can reduce time to market and can be launched within a month. This varies based on business needs and use cases.

Buy or build? or have it customized? Let’s find out what’s more feasible!

Building an OTT app in-house will give you the freedom to customize and scale your streaming platform without any limits. But, you will be spending a considerable chunk of your time and cost on operational overheads and building dev teams.

Partnering with an experienced mobile application development firm for custom app creation will cost you relatively less than building the entire infrastructure and hiring a dev team to build, customize and deploy your product.

But here’s a hybrid approach that makes for a complete WIN-WIN!

You can take advantage of a ready application framework that already has all the essential features and can be quickly customized as per your needs within weeks! This ensures superior product quality, cost-efficiency and quick time to market. And, the money you save can go into creating new content and marketing it!

For more than two decades, we have been using the latest technologies to deliver breakthrough solutions for clients. In an industry shaped by evolving consumer behavior, we understand that customized and personalized content experience matters.

Leverage our proven domain expertise – full-fledged consulting and development services to identify, assess and deploy custom software solutions with end-to-end integrations. We understand the ins and outs of most common business workflows and can help you out at each step of the way, from video ingestion to management to monetization.

As a trusted media & entertainment software development company, we can turn your idea into reality to level up your business on a global scale.