OTT Challenges: Challenges of building an OTT Infrastructure and OTT Measurement

With more and more consumers turning to OTT services, such as Video-on-demand viewing and messaging. Marketing analysts predict that increasing ad dollars to go towards the Over-the-Top space. The same momentum is expected Globally, but some regions face some OTT Challenges that threaten to hold back the monetization latitude.

Over the top content is still a relatively new medium and competing with linear TV. Linear TV has a significant hold on the market, and it also predicts the most common issue on digital advertising such as standardization, fraud, viewability, certainly, and measurement.

What Are the Challenges in OTT Infrastructure?

One of the most significant issues that OTT providers were continuously facing is infrastructure. Cable providers provide traditionally build and deliver through networks, unlike the OTT providers. But OTT providers must rely on the utility poles which already exist. Indeed, there will be more OTT offerings in the years to come. Content discovery, meeting demand, viewers retention, and multicast challenge are few OTT Challenges that many content creators face.

Challenges of building an OTT Infrastructure:

• Making the device compatible content
• Addressing the Storage Issues on OTT Infrastructure
• Experience the best quality streaming content
• Offering a sense of scalability
• High bandwidth needs
• Low latency requirements
• Unreliable connectivity
• Security concerns, including data encryption and authentication
• Understanding the technical requirements of your content
• Finding a reliable partner to help build and manage your infrastructure
• Selecting the best technology for each part of your platform
• Calibrating encoding, transcoding, and streaming technologies to ensure quality service with high efficiency
• Managing bandwidth constraints as you scale up
• Creating a reliable and scalable CDN
• Selecting the right content delivery network provider for your needs
• Understanding how to maintain a solid streaming buffer to provide an optimal experience for viewers
• Securing high-speed bandwidth with providers that offer cost-effective, low latency service
• Managing and updating the infrastructure
• Ensuring a consistent user experience across all devices
• Developing an OTT strategy that is aligned with business goals
• Supporting legacy systems while developing new ones
• Lack of bandwidth
• Expensive and challenging to scale data storage
• High latency for streaming video content
• Data security concerns

What Are the Challenges in OTT Measurement?

As a massive part of the OTT advertising spend goes into CTV advertising, there will be more increased pressure for OTT measurement in over the top environments to ensure ad spend has been effective in this medium. Most of the digital activities have the measures and to ensure OTT will be no different.

Challenges of building an OTT Measurement:

• Fragmentation in Marketplace such as audience targetin:g, creative, and measuring an OTT campaign.
• Demands for greater specificity continuous for Measuring Campaign Performance.
• Enjoy the more Streaming Content.
• Become Master on Mobile Web.
• Facing Security issues in Programmatic OTT advertising growth.
• Inaccurate data
• No standard measurement for OTT viewing
• Lack of transparency from providers to accurately measure subscribers and viewership
• Lack of a standard measurement framework
• Different assumptions and interpretations about what OTT is
• Measurement challenges when it comes to data collection, storage, analysis, and reporting
• Audience measurement is not a one-size-fits-all solution
• The OTT landscape is constantly changing
• There are many types of measurements to consider when determining the success of an OTT campaign, including completion rates, engagement metrics, and frequency of viewing
• For a metric to be useful, it must be comparable across different platforms
• There are a lot of challenges that come with building an OTT measurement
• First, you need to understand the different types of video content and how they behave on your platform
• You also need to know what type of data you want to measure and how it will be collected for it to work properly
• Finally, you need to make sure that all necessary parties are on board with the project
• Tracking and reporting on viewing behavior
• Building a new measurement system that is accurate, scalable, and cost-effective
• Creating a unified metric for measuring engagement across devices
• Ensuring the quality of data collected
• Advertisers want to know what their campaign did and how much it cost
• Publishers need an easy way to measure the success of their content
• There are a lot of different platforms with different data sources that can be used for measurement, which is difficult for advertisers and publishers alike
• Some companies have resources in-house while others rely on third parties, but they all have unique challenges
• The lack of a common set of metrics
• Getting all the data from various sources into one place
• Making sure that the data is accurate and up-to-date
• Having enough bandwidth to handle the traffic for online video streaming
• Traditional TV measurement is not accurate for OTT
• The lack of a common currency across publishers and distributors makes it challenging to compare data
• Data providers must be able to measure all the different ways that viewers are watching content – including linear, live streaming, on-demand, and time-shifting
• Content owners need to provide access to their video player for third parties like Nielsen or ComScore to track viewership

OTT Challenges & Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Confusion on Understanding your Audience:

First of all, you need to know who is going to use and consume your screaming. Do some research on your audience about what type of content more consuming.

Utilizing wrong Technologies:

The right way is using the cloud technologies in your streaming, and the cloud technologies provide the power to quick scalability and efficient capital expenditure of relying on on-premised equipment.

Delivering Wrong content:

Here, Content is becoming one of the most expensive that you need to know every minute of GB countable. Content providers should leverage the content that the audience wants and utilizing TV business analytics.

Providing Poor User Experience:

One of the biggest issues that every OTT provider faces is offering quality content and a user-friendly environment. Make sure to offer exceptionally user interface designs and support to multi-device platforms.

Catching a bad wave:

Every OTT provider must know that there are tides and trends in this industry. OTT market is designed similarly to the stock market. The rewards are good, but at the same time, you should face some risks.

Expectations Managing:

Some of the OTT companies made successful investments in their operations as the returns also good as expected by the OTT providers. Many companies are achieved by subscribers’ numbers, but some issues should manage internally.

What are the Challenges Faced by an OTT Platform?

Multicast Challenge:

One of the challenges that OTT providers are facing is providing ISP’s support to multicast protocols.

Bottleneck Checks:

Few Bottlenecks that OTT providers facing are private use of CDNs, dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP such as Adobe streaming and Microsoft smooth streaming.

Content Discovery:

Modern consumers want to find out their required content within a fraction of second, and they don’t want to waste their time searching for content.

Need for More Power:

OTT platforms deal with high-quality content, which means they need for excellent processing power and compression.

Content Challenge:

Content is the heart for OTT providers, need to offer high-quality content. Provide niche content to overcome all the OTT Challenges.

Managing with Semantics-Driven Video Ads:

Over the top content providers and platforms must lead with the semantic driven advertising. Leverage viewers not to restrict them from viewing the ads.

Meeting Demand:

OTT providers must find viral content to overcome the challenges. Viral content is demanding in all ott platforms need to find niche content.

Viewer Retention:

Viewers’ retention is a significant bottleneck to the OTT providers. It should offer what type of content users want in HD quality, and ad content should be non-instructive, which means they can skip the ads.

Enable Personalization Approach for Viewers:

You should enable the more personalization features to the viewers to get a huge audience reach to your OTT platforms.

Adding Metadata into Content Workflows:

Optimize yours over the top and on-demand content for more discoverable on platforms.

Quality Control and Automated Content Compliance:

Make sure to check the quality and include the content automation tools for your over the top platforms.

• Creating a new streaming service
• Finding enough content to fill the library
• Determining pricing strategies for their customers
• Maintaining customer satisfaction with their service
• Connecting to the internet
• Telling if there is an outage in service
• Competing with other OTT providers
• Choosing the right content to provide
• Achieving a balance between quality and quantity of content
• Ensuring that all devices are supported
• Creating a video library
• Making sure videos work on different devices
• Ensuring that the video is available for download and streaming in both high-quality and low-quality formats
• Adding subtitles to your videos
• Managing the cost of content
• Ensuring that content is available in a variety of languages
• Keeping up with technological innovations and new services offered by competitors
• Making sure that their customers are happy

Challenges to Launching an OTT Service

• Add Different Subscription Models
• Come up with Rental Schemes
• Include Content Purchase Options
• Introducing Freemium-to-Premium Conversion
• Maintain Audience Targeting parameters in Advertising
• Provide a robust, modern and user-friendly platform for your viewers
• Offering attractive and compelling video content
• Come up with efficient customer acquisition strategies
• Use Artificial Intelligence Technologies
• Lack of awareness among non-technical users
• High churn rate due to low customer satisfaction levels
• Finding a way to stream content without buffering
• Developing a new streaming protocol for the internet
• Building an app that can be used on any device and in any country
• Acquiring rights to content from studios and networks
• Getting your content to the right audience
• Building a brand that people trust
• Securing sponsorship deals with advertisers and brands
• Ensuring your service is available on all devices
• Convincing the public to switch from cable or satellite TV
• Convincing their current providers to carry your service
• Creating a compelling content library that people will want to watch
• Content
• Infrastructure
• Platforms and devices
• Monetization

Conclusion:

There are various challenges that OTT Players and platforms are facing in the On-demand streaming industry. Overcoming the multi-device viewing and reaching the global market are still significant concerns in Over the Top market. OTT has created new opportunities for content distribution to the audience in any market. Viewers have their own choice of choosing the content and the flexibility to watch their favourite content anywhere anytime. There are still many challenges that continue to persist in this OTT space, which will further evolve with new opportunities.