Solving the Rubik's Cube of OTT Content Acquisition & Planning

In today’s increasingly competitive OTT platform space, the biggest challenge may well be the ability to cost effectively identify and license content that will drive both subscriber acquisition and retention in the most cost-efficient ways possible.

With the fragmentation of the streaming media landscape, the would-be best practices for building and keeping either a large-scale audience or a niche interest platform have been evolving rapidly.

Not only have platform options proliferated, providing content consumers an ever-expanding set of options, but variations in content delivery and monetization models have left platforms having to plan and compete on a Rubik’s cube-like field of play.

• Subscription supported vs Ad-supported.

• On-Demand vs. ‘Linear’ programming.

• Wide appeal vs. niche appeal.

• Original vs. curated titles.

• US vs. International markets.

These are all decisions that factor into the success or failure of a nascent platform trying to attract and retain a forward-leaning and loyal audience. These myriad considerations, coupled with endless libraries of available titles, have brought an end to the days when content acquisition could be conducted by a ‘gut-feel’ about what would appeal to a given audience or simply picking up random buckets of titles.

Taking just one of these dichotomies as an example, the factors involved in building a content library for a SVOD model can be very different from those taken into consideration for building an AVOD model. SVOD audiences tend to expect higher profile and more current content with higher levels of correlation to their own tastes because they are paying directly for their experience. On the other hand, because they are able to watch for ‘free,’ - AVOD audiences are generally willing to be served more long-tail or ‘comfort food’ content – whether full seasons of classic TV shows or movie titles from favorite actors that weren’t considered ‘hits’ and therefore flew under the radar.

Fortunately, because the very act of streaming is a digital medium, content procurers no longer need to ‘shoot in the dark.’ Streaming behaviors can be observed, catalogued and correlated in ways that traditional programming executives could never have dreamed – allowing OTT platforms to focus with laser-like precision around the factors that they find most important to attract and retain their particular audience and they can make acquisition decisions that are backed up by historical and real-time data – bring science to a process that has always been seen as a dark art.

Check out TVRev's FREE Industry report on data-driven content acquisition strategies, featuring a dive into PeerLogix's 'OTT Moneyball' approach for content platforms.

To learn more about PeerLogix's OTT data capabilities, check out www.PeerLogix.com/ebook.