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OTT App Building Guide:
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The 10 Factors You Can’t Miss- Part Two
+ Checklists & Recommendations
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OTT App Building Guide: Building & Managing - Part One
The 10 Factors You Can’t
1 CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Miss - Part Two
2 DESIGN & UX
This guide was created by Applicaster’s head of product, 3 BUILDS
Gabriel Guy, to help simplify the complex process of building,
managing, delivering, and monetizing a streaming app. 4 RUNTIME MANAGEMENT
In Part Two, we’ll explore five factors related to delivering 5 USER MANAGEMENT
and monetizing an OTT app.
DOWNLOAD PART ONE Delivering & Monetizing - Part Two
6 PAYMENTS
7 ANALYTICS
8 PLAYER
9 VIDEO/AUDIO STREAMING & ENCODING
10 ADVERTISEMENTS
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6 Payments (SVOD & TVOD)
Pay attention to operational costs, geography, and genres Checklist
when building your payment plans.
The days of complete dependence on ads for monetization are over, Research your target geography when deciding how to
with the rise of social media networks lowering ad revenue and integrate payments and price content.
regulations preventing easy user targeting. Ads are still vital to an
effective strategy, but media companies should prioritize hybrid
solutions that include paid subscriptions. Keep product plans simple and clear. Complicated plans
will cause user frustration.
Consider keeping some of your content free. It can be a
good marketing strategy, especially during the market
penetration phase.
Before deciding on a payment strategy, assess and
understand your operational overheads. For example,
TVOD (transactional video on demand) can be challenging
to maintain as app stores require a manual setup for each
purchased item.
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7 Analytics
Track app and player usage to drive growth. Checklist
Measuring app usage allows for major content and user experience Build your analytics integration is an actionable way that
improvements. These analytics should guide decision making, both for can drive change. Simply gathering data points is not
business assumption approval and for tracking business goals. enough—reports and visualization tools must help you
better understand your data.
Make sure your analytics are measuring quality and
performance, not just testing user flows like payment
funnels and content discovery. This is especially important
when dealing with users with different operating systems.
Pay specific attention to player analytics—check the length
of user sessions and use it to choose what content to pro-
mote. While doing QA, it’s hard to test full watching ses-
sions, so tracking player usage will allow you to check that
users are enjoying your content.
Read app reviews. App ratings are another great way to get
feedback from users, so pay attention and try solving recur-
ring issues.
Pay attention to store and country regulations like GDPR,
COPPA, etc.
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8 Player
Choose a player that prioritizes the user’s viewing Checklist
experience.
Users want players to be familiar and intuitive, with big industry names Select your player features according to your business and
(like Netflix and YouTube) setting the bar for how a player should work. customer needs. Make sure to map the following features
Media companies should pick a player and player features that meet and consider how they fit into your overall content strategy.
user expectations and needs.
Play next
Analytics integration
Continue watching
Audio language picker
Subtitles
DRM Support
Ads integration
Playing in the background
Confirm that the player can support necessary integrations
and receive all relevant metadata from your streaming
provider and content management tool.
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9 Video/Audio
Streaming & Encoding
Securely serve quality streaming experiences. Checklist
Stream delivery is at the heart of every OTT app. Choosing the Estimate your app’s usage to help build a business model
right streaming provider and features is one of the most important that will adjust well to scale. Without this, evaluating
decisions that a media company can make. encoding and streaming costs can be challenging as
providers calculate costs differently.
Sign your streams! If you want to protect your content, sign
your streams and implement a mechanism that allows only
your app users to watch your content. Failing to do so will
affect your business model and cause unwanted bandwidth
usage.
Choose a provider that supports adjustable bit rates to
balance between quality, device capabilities, and
bandwidth.
10 Advertisements
Optimize monetization by balancing ads and quality content. Checklist
Ads and media have been a package deal since the beginning of the Differentiate between paying and non-paying users.
commercial industry. Although ad-tech is in a current state of disruption
and it can be challenging to predict a long-term business model, ads Use analytics to find the right balance between app usage
still need to be considered when monetizing your product. and the amount of ads per session.
Don’t directly translate the amount of ads on the web to the
amount of ads on an app. Many users use browser ad
blockers, so make sure to calculate real ad impressions.
Consider other forms of advertising beyond the traditional
app and video ads, like promos, brand awareness
campaigns, and product placements. Traditional ads may
be easy to implement and integrate, but they’ve become so
standardized that the industry is placing more ads for less
return. Solutions like product placements are custom in
nature, but offer big ROI if targeted correctly.
Stay aware of changes in the ad market. A good example is
SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion) that allows for embedding
ads as part of a stream. This change is a great solution for
cross-platform distribution as it reduces the need for
implementation libraries like Google IMA.
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Summary
Each of these 10 factors is unique with their own set of rules, but none
of them can live in a vacuum. Users see an OTT app as a service that
makes it possible for them to consume content in the most convenient
ways. What makes a great service is a coherent, balanced experience
that evolves and improves over time. When planning your OTT app
delivery strategy, consider the items on this checklist to maximize user
satisfaction and business success.
Connect with an Applicaster expert to learn how our Zapp platform
simplifies the process of building and managing an OTT app.
Connect with the author!
Our head of product, Gabriel Guy, wants
to know what you think!
REACH OUT This post was inspired by The Twelve-Factor App, an influential
app-building methodology by Adam Wiggins.
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