With COVID 19 outbreak and lockdowns, people are stuck at home looking for ways to entertain themselves. This is an excellent time for video-on-demand businesses to serve their viewers with exciting video content. From relatively humble beginnings, many VOD businesses including Netflix have grown to the most influential streaming services.
If you are a budding video production company that creates excellent quality content, this is the right time to make your own streaming service. Having a VOD platform of your own will help you offer personalized services to your target customers. However, there are some essential things you must consider before launching a VOD business. In this blog, we are going to discuss the same. Let’s get started.
Custom user experience
Offering a personalized user experience must be a priority as modern users demand it. Three main factors contributing to a great user experience are the look, feel, and usability of the video-on-demand service. The video platform must be user-friendly in nature and allow users to discover the content they like effortlessly.
Considering the user perspective, you must deliver a simple user interface, easy navigation, search, excellent streaming quality, and accessibility on multiple devices. And if you intend to provide your services on a worldwide scale, you should ensure that the users have the ability to stream videos effortlessly. To do that, you would require a content delivery network to speed up the delivery of video streams via geographically distributed servers, which minimizes buffering time and latency. This can greatly improve user experience and increase engagement on your platform.
Focus on delivering continuous engagement
Push notifications are another way to engage with your viewers. Craft notifications customized according to the needs and relevance. Sending actionable notifications can help to drive engagement. But, make sure you don’t spam users by sending too many notifications in a short time.
Choose the right video monetization technique
When you have great VOD content, it is easy to make money with your videos. VOD platforms offer versatile choices for generating revenue. Let’s explore the popular revenue generation models for your video-on-demand business.
- Advertising model
This type of model offers content for free, where users can watch content along with the interruption of advertisements. As a VOD business, you make money from ads you run on your platform. Advertisers or sponsors are the ones who pay you, not the viewers.
- Subscription model
Viewers can watch VOD content unlimitedly by paying a subscription fee. The subscription model gives complete control over subscribing and unsubscribing the service. This model brings in recurring revenue.
- Transaction model
The transaction model is basically a pay-per-view model where viewers have to pay for the individual content they want to watch. They can either rent or purchase the content.
You can gain higher revenues for seasonal content as viewers would be willing to pay more to get timely access to exclusive content. The success of a VOD platform lies in the business model it chooses. Hence make sure you choose the right revenue strategy that suits your content type and your target audience the best.
Build a rich video library
To establish your VOD businesses, you must have a rich video library of content that is to entertain your viewers. To gain new users and increase your viewership, having amazing content is crucial. While quality must be the focus, quantity is also necessary to keep going. Streaming giants like Netflix are still releasing new content despite lockdowns and shooting constraints because they have already built a pipeline of content earlier.
Great quality video delivery
Planning how you are going to deliver your videos to your viewers is another essential factor to consider. This is going to be a critical factor in offering a memorable viewing experience to your users. The majority of users tend to abandon the video if it doesn’t load quickly.
Maintaining video quality is another challenge most VOD services face with VOD streaming. Invest in the right technology and tools to provide the best viewing experience to your viewers without buffers or jitters. Collaborate with video hosting services, internet providers, and content delivery networks to make the viewing experience incredible.
Don’t skip competition analysis
Before you make your own streaming service, it is essential to perform a competitor analysis. Most VOD businesses make the mistake of skipping this step. While every VOD service is unique, performing a market analysis will help you understand the trends of the market and your target audience better. There are a multitude of ways in which the analysis can be done. One of them would be browser web scraping. By gathering data for the purpose of analysing the competitors, the business can be kept abreast of the type of services and packages their competitors are offering. Not to mention, they can even conduct market research by using scraping. This will help the business to check sentiment analysis as well by identifying what their potential customers are saying on social media. By knowing that information, the business can create a VOD service that caters to the demands of their target market.
Payment Secutity
Ensuring strong payment security is vital for your Video-on-demand (VOD) business to build trust and safeguard customer financial data. Two effective methods, tokenization and encryption, can play key roles. Tokenization, for instance, can substitute sensitive customer details with unique tokens, securely stored in the VOD system, reducing the risk of unauthorized access in case of a breach. Encryption, on the other hand, can encode payment information, making it unreadable without the decryption key. Wondering which one to opt for in the dilemma of token vs encryption? Why not opt for a combination of tokenization and encryption? It can provide a comprehensive approach, reinforcing robust security measures and ensuring a heightened level of protection for customer financial transactions.
Bonus Tips
Analytics and reporting
To make informed decisions about your VOD services, ensure you have the right in-built analytics and reporting tools. You must consistently track metrics like what type of content your users watch, which devices they prefer, their demographics, location, etc. Most hosting services offer analytics and reporting tools. Once you have the data, you can easily personalize the viewing experience accordingly.
Content security and protection
Having a VOD business also means battling piracy issues daily. You must make sure you implement the right techniques to protect your content from piracy attacks. With the incoming bulk traffic, it becomes difficult for VOD services to track illegal streaming. Make sure you employ security measures like password protection, Digital Rights Management (DRM), dynamic watermarking, encrypted VOD streaming, IP lock, etc.
Multi-device viewing
Modern audiences prefer consuming content on multiple digital devices. Different devices demand different versions for smooth streaming. You must also offer the capability of accessing the content in offline mode. This helps to give control to users to watch videos at their convenience without worrying about internet speed. In addition, provide the option to download video to devices of their choice to watch it later. Casting is another aspect you have to consider to enhance the user experience and help to offer great value for users.
Conclusion
Launching a VOD business is an incredible business idea, especially when everybody prefers watching content online. Although the competition is tight in the video-on-demand space, there is still room for innovative streaming services that can offer great quality content. Choose the right video-on-demand software provider to create your VOD platform, and you are good to go. Hope this blog gave you important insights into things to consider when starting your VOD journey. Looking to see your valuable feedback in the comment section below.
