Video: Are OTT Providers Fishing in the Wrong Pond?
How do you present curated content offerings most effectively to distinguish your OTT service in the "rushing stream of information" that gluts the world of online video today? How do you find the "bulls-eye target of... alignment between the audience and the content offering?" Google's Serge Kassardjian, Whistle Sports' Brian Selander, and Recurly's Dan Burkhart discuss strategies for meeting these challenges in this excerpt from there Streaming Media East 2016 panel, "Building OTT Success: Improving Video Engagement."
Learn more about OTT services at Streaming Media West.
Read the full transcript from this excerpt:
Brian Selander, Whistle Sports Network: I actually started as a journalist, now 20-something years ago, and if you were a news consumer, back then, you'd sort of go to these ponds--The Wall Street Journal, or a Gannett paper, or even NBC--and you would sort of put your line in and then you'd fish out a story about it, and that was how you consumed your media. You'd sort of go someplace, and say, "This is my kind of pond, and this is what the name of it is. I'm going to pull something out." With the rise of Facebook, streaming, and Twitter, and my Snapchat feed, and all of these other places, I'm no longer going pond to pond, I'm kind of standing in the middle of this rushing stream of information, and everything is coming at me from all of these sources, all pouring into the same place. It's now up to me as a consumer to be brand-agnostic and just grab the shiniest, most engaging thing that's going to catch me.
Dan Burkhart, Recurly: Understanding in sort of a test, learn, and iterate fashion where you can align your curated content catalog best, with the channels of customers that are most likely to be engaged with that content, is not something that you, that companies, or publishers tend to get right out of the gate. They have to test, learn, and iterate, and find that bulls-eye target of that nice alignment between the audience and the content offering.
Serge Kassardjian, Google: Quite frankly, the lean-back experience of linear is not broken. People love going through channels, and it works very, very, very well, and when you're thinking about what is the consumer value proposition for an OTT streaming experience, well, it's on demand. It's getting content that you would never be able to get on a linear feed, it's native elements, and it's a much more reactive rather than a proactive approach, to watching content. A lot of times, the system notifications, the merchandising in Roku, all this stuff, are elements that make a much better consumer experience so that the system knows what you want, and it's a curated ... You know, any one of these platforms has a set of apps on the platform, the user has specifically picked those apps, so it's a very, very curated experience to the user. The user's doing the curation, the system needs to provide the content based on that curation that the user is doing.
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