insights & news > Insights
There’s vast potential in the OTT market, but it is also a space where competition runs high. It is easy to get caught up in chasing trends and features without making the right considerations for your OTT service. Success in this space requires a well-structured strategy that should account for awareness of where your service currently is in its lifecycle, who your audience is and what's important to them, and how to make your offering more compelling without over-investing.
To address these challenges, we introduce the Crawl, Walk, Run methodology—a three-phase approach designed to guide you through the complexities of launching and growing a successful OTT video service.
This blog is the first of three in a series diving deep into each phase of the Crawl, Walk, Run approach. By providing insights and considerations for each phase of the whole business’s life cycle, the series helps you navigate the unique challenges and opportunities of every stage in your OTT service's growth journey, empowering you to take each step with confidence and purpose.
Let us first explore the foundation of this methodology - an MVP mindset.
By definition, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the starting scope of a product that enables an organization to glean the greatest understanding and insights about their customers with the least input. However, MVPs are also often seen as the necessary step to prove a business case with a set of basic features to get you to the market quickly. An emphasis needs to be placed instead on the latter part of the definition: maximizing learning about end-users with an optimized investment.
For an OTT service, this concept of an MVP is the cornerstone and should be applied as a mindset that should permeate every step of your strategy. Weighing the pros and cons and leveraging data to drive your business decisions are necessary to ensure you are investing in the product in the right way.
The MVP mindset requires a focus on data collection and processing. In order to truly understand your customers, you need to ask why.
Thinking about what is actually needed for an MVP ensures you maintain an appropriately sized investment while still providing users with the features they need. Additionally, reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of certain features on smaller screens vs bigger screens can enable you to implement more functionality on a subset of greatly used platforms or platforms where it makes more sense. For example, text or input-heavy components should be left to mobile and web.
Having a thorough understanding of your users, you can efficiently leverage the insights to improve the service in the next updates of the app.
Registration flow is too long? Cut it down to a page, or leverage mobile and web platforms if applicable for large-screen applications like TVs. Search engine is not returning the results users are looking for? Look to improve the algorithm’s support of fuzzy matches or perhaps support contextual search results.
Leveraging the MVP mindset and supporting quick turnarounds to solve user problems will create a powerful and optimized roadmap for your application, alongside customer confidence in your offering from being heard. If you anticipate making changes after releasing your service you will be better positioned to action changes and keep your user base engaged.
When it comes to growing your video business, it’s essential to have a clear roadmap that doesn’t just push you forward, but guides you through the right steps at the right time. Enter the "crawl, walk, run" methodology—a success-proven approach designed to help you build your video service in distinct phases, ensuring sustainable growth every step of the way. One of the most significant benefits is that it enables budget optimization through strategic experimentation, allowing you to fine-tune offerings and maximize ROI. At Accedo, we implement this phased approach when managing our customers' video services to ensure service quality and business success.
Let's start by reviewing the first stage.
In the crawl phase, simplicity is key. Focus on delivering the core essentials that meet your target audience's needs. You streamline development, reduce costs, and speed up time-to-market if the feature set is kept manageable.
During this phase, establishing a foundational user base is a top priority. It sets the stage for monetization and provides invaluable insights into user behavior.
When determining what needs to be supported for the MVP, it is necessary to think about what features users want from a video service according to the vertical and how user interaction with those features can be made as simple as possible.
Research of competitors' offerings can enable you to determine what items exist in all services for your specific content vertical. For example, for entertainment services, many video services have some form of content discovery that enables users to search for movies and series content as well as filter by genres. Identifying these key vertical-specific aspects will allow you to prioritize the base components required to launch a successful service.
Monetization strategizing begins early, even if it's in a basic form. At this stage, it’s important to provide a method of revenue collection, but not to over-index.
When reviewing partners to support with payment, select one that can support your needs, but also enable growth or added features as you scale. The early revenue stream not only helps sustain your venture but also serves as a conduit for gathering user feedback and guiding the trajectory of your OTT service.
For instance, according to our recent global end-user survey, we’ve learned that
49% of end-users would be willing to pay extra for access to additional content based on their taste. Knowing such detailed preferences from end-users can help you determine the next set of features that is most suitable for monetization.
During the early stages of planning your video service feature set and monetization, it’s important to consider the operational aspects of your service once launched. Understanding how and who will make use of the service management features available can help tailor how you shape your MVP and your team. When making these decisions with cost at the forefront, it’s also highly recommended to carefully evaluate your team’s strengths and potential shortcomings.
Consider the following questions:
Below is the list of features and items we recommend during the Crawl phase:
Disclaimer: The list shared contains some general recommendations on how to target features for your video service. This is not an exhaustive list and excludes features that are more specific to certain content verticals and relevant to those audiences. Some examples include EPGs, DVR, Parental Controls and other child-specific considerations/features, and various types of stats and scores. The intention is to invoke the consistent feature set required across verticals when planning your OTT video solution.
In the upcoming blog post, we will go on to explore the second phase - Walk. Keep an eye out for our updates!
tags
Share this article
Let's collaborate to define what is next for your OTT streaming service.
Contact us
