Popular Myths about IPTV/OTT Business
IPTV/OTT is one of the most growing markets in the technological field and it is expected to expanse greatly in the coming years.
More companies join the world of digital television and media technologies today since it is no news that the IPTV/OTT market is growing rapidly, and a lot of entrepreneurs seek the opportunity to succeed in it. Some of the companies, which join the market, have already a reach background in the internet technologies, mobile services, system integration, content production, or other related areas. Others have completely different experience and just want to try their luck on a new promising field.
Every company that just came into IPTV/OTT market faces numerous challenges due to some misconceptions (let's call it myths) they have about the business they got into. And in this article we are gonna cover some of the most popular myths about IPTV/OTT.
Myth 1: Platform provider will help organize the business for me and will tell me what to do in order to succeed.
Even though we are really interested in our clients' success and we want to help them in any way possible, unfortunately, there is no chance for us to drive a project for each of our client. We provide the software and we help a client to implement it. Customers attraction, monetization and every other process needed to have a profitable business is all a client's responsibility. But car manufacturers don't teach you how to drive a car, do they?
On the other hand, there are some people, who believe they know everything and who don't like to ask any questions about implementation of their project, but demand the software to work exactly as they think or how it was initially planned.
Despite our experience with realization of projects in more than 60 countries around the globe, every project is still unique at certain aspects (e.g. new billing system, payment or SMS gateway, some customization of the platform features, etc.), that is why a lot of new questions may arise during a deployment and the team including the customer should be ready to adapt to such situations.
Myth 2: I should get premium content and find reliable platform in order to succeed with my IPTV/OTT project!
One of the key elements for a success in any project is attraction of users to the service. In order to sell your product you have to make sure that your target audience knows what you offer, which is a marketing task. Never underestimate marketing and sales efforts by spending all your attention to technologies perfection.
Good content, reliable head-end, fast delivery channels, easy to use player application, legal and licensing issues, and many other questions have to be solved in order to become successful in IPTV/OTT-business. But nothing of it will work unless you let your potential customers know that you have all these beautiful things arranged for them.
We, for example, spend up to 30% of our budget on marketing activities and we advise our clients to have 10-30% of project resources to spend on marketing and sales efforts.
Myth 3: I need "beautiful" application, which will attract more customers!
Of course, your application have to be attractive so your users would like an appearance of it. But you have to keep in mind that, firstly, people are different and have various tastes, and, secondly people get used to a good design very quickly and start to pay attention to ease of use and functionality of the application.
Telebreeze player was designed by the team of professional UI/UX designers in order to create not only good looking, but also handy and functional application.
Surely, we provide our platform as a white-label solution, which means that each client is able to modify the appearance of the player for his customers by updating the logo, fonts, background images and doing some other changes in the application's interface that do not affect the general functionality.
Myth 4: Why don't you add or change something quickly for me? You're developers - it must be easy for you!
We are always happy to make some changes and improvements in our platform and specifically in the player application. But before we do so we analyze how proposed changes will affect the platform for our other clients.
We've had cases when some adjustments, that seemed to be improvements at first sight, were negatively accepted by some of our clients and we had to work on another solution. Thus, we are always open for requests on customization of our platform for the customer's needs but we always consider possible drawbacks and put stability of the platform on the 1st place among the other reasons.
Myth 5: I need just your middleware and I will write my own player application within a month.
Making a player application may seem pretty simple at the first sight comparing for example to a middleware or a transcoder application. But making a good looking player with a functional yet simple interface appears to be not as easy as it seams. Especially, if we talk about the application for several different platforms such as a desktop PC, mobile device, and a set top box, each having different control interfaces (mouse, touch screen and remote control), screen sizes, performance of the hardware, various operating systems, development tools, and many other differences.
Therefore when the customer asks for the API for our system or to make a completely new player for his project, we gladly welcome such requests and provide our API or give estimations for the custom player development taking in to account that it will take a team of ten people to work for six months or more.
Successful IPTV/OTT business consists of many components:
More companies join the world of digital television and media technologies today since it is no news that the IPTV/OTT market is growing rapidly, and a lot of entrepreneurs seek the opportunity to succeed in it. Some of the companies, which join the market, have already a reach background in the internet technologies, mobile services, system integration, content production, or other related areas. Others have completely different experience and just want to try their luck on a new promising field.
Every company that just came into IPTV/OTT market faces numerous challenges due to some misconceptions (let's call it myths) they have about the business they got into. And in this article we are gonna cover some of the most popular myths about IPTV/OTT.
Myth 1: Platform provider will help organize the business for me and will tell me what to do in order to succeed.
Even though we are really interested in our clients' success and we want to help them in any way possible, unfortunately, there is no chance for us to drive a project for each of our client. We provide the software and we help a client to implement it. Customers attraction, monetization and every other process needed to have a profitable business is all a client's responsibility. But car manufacturers don't teach you how to drive a car, do they?
On the other hand, there are some people, who believe they know everything and who don't like to ask any questions about implementation of their project, but demand the software to work exactly as they think or how it was initially planned.
Despite our experience with realization of projects in more than 60 countries around the globe, every project is still unique at certain aspects (e.g. new billing system, payment or SMS gateway, some customization of the platform features, etc.), that is why a lot of new questions may arise during a deployment and the team including the customer should be ready to adapt to such situations.
Myth 2: I should get premium content and find reliable platform in order to succeed with my IPTV/OTT project!
One of the key elements for a success in any project is attraction of users to the service. In order to sell your product you have to make sure that your target audience knows what you offer, which is a marketing task. Never underestimate marketing and sales efforts by spending all your attention to technologies perfection.
Good content, reliable head-end, fast delivery channels, easy to use player application, legal and licensing issues, and many other questions have to be solved in order to become successful in IPTV/OTT-business. But nothing of it will work unless you let your potential customers know that you have all these beautiful things arranged for them.
We, for example, spend up to 30% of our budget on marketing activities and we advise our clients to have 10-30% of project resources to spend on marketing and sales efforts.
Myth 3: I need "beautiful" application, which will attract more customers!
Of course, your application have to be attractive so your users would like an appearance of it. But you have to keep in mind that, firstly, people are different and have various tastes, and, secondly people get used to a good design very quickly and start to pay attention to ease of use and functionality of the application.
Telebreeze player was designed by the team of professional UI/UX designers in order to create not only good looking, but also handy and functional application.
Surely, we provide our platform as a white-label solution, which means that each client is able to modify the appearance of the player for his customers by updating the logo, fonts, background images and doing some other changes in the application's interface that do not affect the general functionality.
Myth 4: Why don't you add or change something quickly for me? You're developers - it must be easy for you!
We are always happy to make some changes and improvements in our platform and specifically in the player application. But before we do so we analyze how proposed changes will affect the platform for our other clients.
We've had cases when some adjustments, that seemed to be improvements at first sight, were negatively accepted by some of our clients and we had to work on another solution. Thus, we are always open for requests on customization of our platform for the customer's needs but we always consider possible drawbacks and put stability of the platform on the 1st place among the other reasons.
Myth 5: I need just your middleware and I will write my own player application within a month.
Making a player application may seem pretty simple at the first sight comparing for example to a middleware or a transcoder application. But making a good looking player with a functional yet simple interface appears to be not as easy as it seams. Especially, if we talk about the application for several different platforms such as a desktop PC, mobile device, and a set top box, each having different control interfaces (mouse, touch screen and remote control), screen sizes, performance of the hardware, various operating systems, development tools, and many other differences.
Therefore when the customer asks for the API for our system or to make a completely new player for his project, we gladly welcome such requests and provide our API or give estimations for the custom player development taking in to account that it will take a team of ten people to work for six months or more.
Successful IPTV/OTT business consists of many components:
- Good content that is gonna be interested to an audience.
- Stable platform that includes Middleware, content preparation and content distribution modules.
- User-friendly and functional player application for popular playback platforms.
- Reliable delivery channels.
- Working marketing strategy.