As wecontinue to make preparations to unveil our new platform at IBC 2022 in September, I want to look beyond the design and metadata themes of the first two articles in this series of four, to explore the third “pillar" that underpins the platform’s unique capabilities: markets.
Below, we look into how being able to segment and address new target markets within the platform, and new target audiences within the markets, makes for streaming services that are highly personalised yet highly revenue-oriented, with extensive flexibility and control.
The global streaming landscape is undergoing radical transformation, with consumers becoming ever more likely to purchase new subscriptions to niche services, rather than expanding the mainstream entertainment subscriptions they already have.
Streaming content is therefore now becoming available from many diverse sources, in many different forms, and this “content fragmentation” - described in research by financesonline.com as “one of the most notable streaming services trends there is” – gives multiple audiences from multiple markets multiple potential streaming destinations.
At the same time, these destinations, driven by the emergence of as-a-service streaming tools, are themselves proliferating.
Inevitably, then, competition for streaming consumers is hotting up. But the battle to attract and retain them will be won not just by the nature and theme of the content that’s on offer, but how effectively the delivery of that content pushes the buttons of these increasingly fragmented markets and audiences, and differentiates the service from the competition.
This is where our new platform plays exceptionally strongly – and here’s how.
Making streaming content more relevant and personalised for an audience or market can take many forms, but fundamentally for the service to succeed it must make consumers’ wishes and the streaming business’s commercial outcomes meet in the middle.
This is ultimately about having full control over who sees what content, which devices they watch it on, when they watch it, and where they watch it, with individual pricing targeted at each market.
Equally, however, it’s about the step before that: having the tools to glean and constantly update data on consumers’ behaviour withint he service, and how they engage with it (what they click on and search for, for example), in order to support those more effective outcomes we mention above.
Our new platform delivers both these benefits, so let’s look at a few practical examples of how that might work in practice.
A hotel empire, for example, could create completely different streaming propositions at the level of a hotel chain, individual hotels, or even rooms within a hotel, so that, for example, premium rooms could get free-to-guest movies whilst other rooms could get pay-per-view (we touched on this in our first article in this series).
Equally, a company, government department, or educational institution could create a streaming service that slickly melds both internal-and external-facing material to present each audience with timely content that is appropriate, strategic, and compelling, but that can also be fine-tuned in real time, based on viewer engagement and behaviour.
Within these markets, more detailed data such as age,gender, location, language, interests, special events, and just about any other variable can also be captured and used to segment what content is delivered to whom, on which devices, and how it is organised and presented visually - injust a button-click or two.
It’s even possible to create this segmented content in white-labelled form, for distribution through partners who have greater market penetration and reach, and to create separate marketing campaigns for audiences and markets. In this way the tailoring of a service is not just limited to consumer driven data e.g. data driven recommendation engines, it is also driven by the content owners business goals and objectives, i.e. it gives business the tools to also make lucrative commercial deals in anything from content acquisition to content distribution.
In short, give both consumers and business more of what they want in the way they want to have it, and the business can get to a wider audience thorough more channels, and those consumers will come back time and again to get and pay for more of it – that’s how consumer experience and content owners’ business needs come together across audiences and markets, in a single platform!
We’ve explored a number of critical streaming themes over the past three articles (including this one), and seen how our new platform steps up to the mark on all of them.
In the last article in the series, on coalescence, we’ll summarise what we’ve said so far, and show how the different critical strands unite seamlessly to form a streaming platform solution that is unique in its focus onthe exciting opportunities afforded by truly differentiated streaming content.
Make sure you’re up to speed ahead of the show!
To meet us at IBC 2022, just come along to stand 5.c44 at the RAI Amsterdam, 9 – 12 September, or if you’d like to schedule a meeting with us contact us here.
Easel TV
1 Waterhouse Square
London EC1N 2ST
T: +44 (0)20 3026 3605
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