Four Strategic Insights from an OTT Veteran: What We Learned as a B2C Streamer

Running an OTT video service is a constant battle to stay up to date with the latest tech and consumer trends, but some challenges are universal and have been with us since the earliest days of the internet. So when you’re choosing a technology platform, it can be comforting to know your service provider has been in your shoes. 

A decade of streaming excellence, available off the shelf

It’s been more than 10 years since I co-founded Magine TV, a B2C linear streaming service at a time when the concept of delivering live video to consumers over the internet was still relatively unusual. We saw the potential for cord-cutting and multi-channel OTT aggregation platforms. 

Although I’d been working in commercial and Pay TV since the 80s, the Magine TV project involved a massive learning curve around all the elements that go into developing a robust and attractive OTT service. We poured all our knowledge into developing what is now the Magine Pro OTT platform. Initially, we built it to serve our own subscribers, but now we make that same platform available to OTT services all over the world as an off-the-shelf solution.

Our unique track record in running D2C services means that it’s not just tech that you get when you work with Magine Pro, it’s our expertise. So, here are the four most important strategic insights I gained from our early days in streaming that I still believe are enormously valuable for today’s crop of new and growing consumer services: 

• Know your audience and let that be your guiding star
• Start small, but get ready to scale-up fast
• Don’t try to do everything yourself 
• Move with the times, and don’t be afraid to pivot

Want to know more? Here’s the detail: 

Know your audience and let that be your guiding star

In the early days of planning our B2C streaming service, our goal was to appeal to the widest possible audience. We calculated this required access to 80% of the most-watched content in each market, necessitating partnerships with the free-to-air and public service broadcasters. This proved challenging and we eventually withdrew from certain markets where negotiations were particularly strenuous. 

Today, we leverage this experience to advise niche streaming services on the importance of carefully defining their target audience. Unlike giants like Netflix and Disney+, niche services such as horror-themed VOD service Splatter and Romantic OTT service Passionflix, thrive by focusing intently on their specific viewer demographics, rather than trying to emulate everything done by their broad-based, mass-market rivals. 

Start small, but get ready to scale-up fast

Take your development step-by-step. Looking back, we tried to do too many markets at once and spread ourselves a little thin. We were thriving in Germany and trying to launch in the UK and Spain. In parallel, we were doing great joint-venture business with TV operators as far afield as Thailand and China. My advice to anyone launching an OTT service today is always to evaluate every next step from a number of different angles – both when launching product features and apps, but also when looking to expand into different markets or genres. 

One thing we learned a lot about in the early days was the importance of scale. In the summer of 2014, Germany won the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Our football-mad German audience couldn’t get enough of the tournament and it was described by some as the first “cord-cutters cup”. Serving hundreds of thousands of concurrent streams with low latency, HD quality, live video, and no buffering was a massive technical challenge. 

It’s the reason why the Magine Pro platform is still one of the most robust and scalable OTT platforms in the industry – because we know what it feels like to hear the opening whistle of the match and see the user numbers soar. You need to be confident that your tech will hold up under the strain. 

Don’t try to do everything yourself 

When we started work back in 2012 on what would become the consumer-facing Magine TV service, there weren’t any standardised software solutions handling live and catchup streaming. We built everything in-house, including the ability to use the mobile phone as a remote to cast to the big screen in the days before Chromecast. Today it’s very different. Companies like Magine Pro offer off-the-shelf solutions for reaching all consumer devices, including Smart TVs. Since SaaS OTT products are now widely available, if we’d had the choice back then, we’d have focused on the product market fit of the content, and worked with technology partners/platforms, rather than try to handle both.

Many OTT services are still tempted to build their own services because they think it will give them complete control over their UX and feature development. In the buy vs build debate, there are pros and cons on each side. In our experience, focusing on where you can really add value is the key to success, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Find a platform that’s configurable enough to give you the UX you want, without the hassle. 

Move with the times, and don’t be afraid to pivot

In its day, Magine TV was undoubtedly a pioneer. I still remember the look of surprise on the faces of the journalists when we did our first pre-launch app demonstrations in a cable car over the Rhine. Showing live TV channels streaming to an iPad without a hint of a wired internet connection was at the forefront of viewing UX. A decade on, and no-one blinks at the idea of watching live streams on their phone from almost anywhere in the world. 

Magine Pro has continued to move with the times, adding support for new and emerging devices, including the Big Screen Smart TVs which now account for over half of all streamed viewing for adults. We’ve helped customers to move with the economic times by adjusting to hybrid business models and take steps to tackle churn, lean-in to personalisation for improved engagement, and curate their content for improved content discovery. 

It’s important to be ready to pivot when the market requires it. We walked away from those plans to launch in the Spanish and UK markets because it wasn’t financially viable. Then our ultimate pivot came when we realised our platform could be used by many different services rather than just our own. So in 2018 we sold our B2C business and adopted a fully B2B strategy, focusing on expanding our OTT platform to be the best end-to-end solution in the market. 

Today we have a varied customer base of streaming services that rely on our design, UX, app development, content management and monetisation expertise to maximise their reach and delight their consumers. 

Want to know more? 

If you’d like to see for yourself how the Magine Pro OTT platform has evolved to offer a fully featured solution for niche streaming services to reach consumers on every device, why not book a meeting with our expert team?