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When users encounter buffering, app crashes, or failed content starts, frustration builds, and so does the risk of cancellations. For OTT streaming services, poor quality that affects the user experience will very quickly hit your bottom line, meaning increased customer churn and missed revenue opportunities from ad disruptions or playback issues. Given that acquiring new customers is often far more expensive than retaining existing ones, the lack of proper and sufficient investment in QA will be more detrimental to the business than you could foresee.
A strong QA strategy goes beyond simply catching bugs. It’s about ensuring “experience excellence” through usability, performance, and exploratory testing. In this blog, we’ll break down all key QA expenses you’ll need to account for as a streaming service owner, including hidden ones that are easy to overlook.
While every business has its own unique requirements, understanding these cost areas will help you gauge your potential investment and make informed decisions.
When forming a QA powerhouse, you need a combination of leadership and specialized skills to establish efficient workflows, ensure proper collaboration across departments, and deliver consistently high-quality results.
QA leadership is particularly important for selecting the right processes, tools, and methods while maintaining collaboration with customers, developers, and partners - an essential factor in ensuring seamless quality assurance. It pays off to invest significantly in assembling a diverse team with expertise in functional testing (core app performance), performance testing (load and stress handling), and security testing (safeguarding data and content).
Effective QA relies on access to the right testing tools, automation frameworks, and device labs. While free or open-source testing tools exist, integrating them into workflows is often time-intensive and requires maintenance, which can unexpectedly drive up expenses. The age of the software being tested also affects QA costs: older software can introduce technical debt and complexity, requiring more extensive testing and patching.
Real-device testing is key to identifying issues related to hardware-specific behaviors and network connectivity that simulators simply can’t replicate - many playback or performance issues only show up on specific hardware.
For OTT streaming apps, this means purchasing the latest smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and set-top boxes regularly - an expense that only grows as devices rapidly evolve.
OTT services must deliver consistent experiences across a broad range of devices, locations, and languages. Apps built for multi-device playback (from smartphones to smart TVs) require extensive testing, and the more platforms you support, the more your QA effort will expand.
It is not rocket science that the bigger your service is, the more money you need to put into QA.
If your streaming service is global, multi-region testing adds an extra layer of complexity due to varying network conditions and CDN performance. Geographical differences may cause what works smoothly in one region to experience delays, buffering, or crashes in another.
But these are just the tip of the iceberg.
OTT platforms are inherently complex, often involving multi-language support, Digital Rights Management (DRM), adaptive streaming, and extensive analytics. All of these combined demand broader test coverage and deeper validation.
Cross-language support is a typical example: QA teams don’t just need to test for basic functionality across languages - they must also conduct visual and layout testing. Captions, metadata, and UI elements must be tested to ensure that formatting and readability meet regional and cultural expectations. A button label or subtitle that breaks in one language may affect the user experience in significant ways.
As your service scales, this complexity grows exponentially, requiring more devices, regions, and feature variations to be tested regularly.
Every major app release, feature update, or expansion into new regions can trigger a surge in testing requirements. This often results in skyrocketing temporary expenses due to the need for overtime work, temporary contract testers, and additional resources.
For example, a major app update could require doubling your QA team for several months just to meet release deadlines. The more frequent the updates, the more frequently you’ll face this scaling challenge. Continuous weekly or monthly releases require ongoing testing cycles, which can make scaling even more expensive and difficult to manage.
With new platforms, devices, and regulations emerging regularly, your QA team must be continuously trained to stay ahead of the curve. Investment in upskilling is needed to ensure that your testers understand the nuances of different devices and compliance requirements. Without consistent training, teams risk falling behind, leading to longer testing cycles, missed bugs, and delayed releases.
Knowledge of regulations on compliance also needs to be constantly updated. OTT services often operate in highly regulated environments, with region-specific laws on user data protection, accessibility, and content distribution. Delays in identifying and adapting to regulatory changes can lead to costly fines, legal fees, or even service interruptions.
To evaluate QA efficiency and keep the costs under control, you should keep tabs on the following key metrics:
Automation is one of the most effective ways to reduce QA costs. Manual testing across several platforms, especially when running repetitive regression tests, is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Automating these repetitive tasks reduces the burden on QA teams, allowing them to focus on exploratory and edge-case testing that requires human intuition.
With automation, large volumes of regression tests can be run simultaneously across multiple devices and regions, drastically cutting down the time and cost associated with manual testing. Over time, as automated test suites mature, maintenance costs are offset by long-term savings, faster test cycles, and fewer post-release issues.
Partnering with an OTT-specialized QA agency isn’t about replacing your in-house team but complementing their strengths with on-demand, tailored expertise that understands the unique challenges of streaming services.
Outsourcing QA to external partners, you gain flexible resources that kick in when your team needs them most, like during major product launches or sudden platform-specific challenges (think Apple TV updates).
OTT experts come equipped with deep domain knowledge, industry-proven best practices, and familiarity with OTT-specific technologies, seamlessly integrating with your internal staff while sharing insights and elevating your overall QA capabilities. Your team can focus on familiar platforms while external specialists handle the nuances of others, ensuring smooth updates across all devices and regions.
When it comes to scalability and testing demands spike, you can quickly ramp up coverage without the delays and costs of hiring full-time staff. And when things quiet down, you can scale back easily, keeping QA lean and efficient. With access to top talent, 24/7 device labs, and expertise in handling real-device testing across OTT environments, testing remains continuous and optimized for high-quality streaming experiences.
We offer ready-to-use automation frameworks that reduce manual testing efforts over time. By optimizing test cases and automating repeatable tasks, we can help you lower long-term testing costs while improving speed and accuracy. In various client projects, we successfully reduced time to market from 80 to just 2 hours, and cut down regression testing time from 40 hours per platform to just 4 hours using automation capabilities, driving faster releases, quicker issue resolution, and improved time to market.
Our established relationships with OEMs like Apple, Roku, and Samsung give us early insights into device updates and OS changes, ensuring your app remains compatible and avoids costly performance issues or rejections during deployment.
Start optimizing your QA process today and unlock faster releases, lower costs, and a seamless path to market!
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