Moving to OTT and Streamlining Ad Buying

As indicated by a number of research companies, Online TV episode and movie revenues will  more than double from $68 billion in 2018 to $159 billion in 2024, with around $17 billion added in 2019 alone. Stay tuned as we explain why now is a great time to launch an OTT channel.

The OTT market is on the brink of a major boom. The popularity of the platforms providing OTT services has grown significantly in recent years. Streaming is now available to more consumers on more smart devices than ever. Just look at DAZN…

For traditional Broadcasters, SDI-based video delivery has become a critical requirement for revenue growth. It is estimated that worldwide spending on the technologies and services enabling digital transformation will reach almost $2 trillion in 2022. It is also worth noting that a number of major broadcasters are looking at investing around 15 / 20% of their revenue to grow in OTT the market space.

As we all probably know, OTT services give the broadcaster a deeper understanding of its customers – enabling targeted advertising and in theory increasing advertising revenues. 

Nowadays, launching an OTT channel is simpler than ever. The technology for delivering digital video is on point. It’s now seamless.

OTT service providers are now providing more than just films or sports programs. They help your marketing department and advertisers by directly targeting your customers which adds lots of value to your advertisers. Going back to customer behaviour targeting this will give you and the advertiser a higher engagement and ad click through level. With OTT services you are able to create almost personal advertisements which will give a higher conversion rate.

Broadcasters meet up with full-fledged delivery measurement. 

Just as impressions are becoming the common currency for purchasing and selling advertising across platforms and media types, the industry will continue the move towards a standard delivery metric that broadcasters like NBCU & Sky began sometime in late 2017 / 2018. NBCU touted CFlight as, “The industry’s first cross-platform, unified advertising currency metric.” In a nutshell, broadcasters will sell an impact no matter how it’s consumed. This might mean that an ordered spot in broadcast will have some fulfilment in connected TV, time shifted consumption, or IP based delivery of content. NBC may be the first to announce such an initiative, but others are bound to follow. Nobody can argue the big value of a universal measurement methodology, one that gives a holistic view of ad delivery across all digital and linear platforms, including live, time-shifted, on-demand, and OTT. 

Local broadcasters have fallen behind competitors in providing highly-specified targeting data to enable better segmentation amongst audiences. Improving their ability to spot and segment viewers will enable local TV to supply advertisers more customized audiences, helping linear media to compete with digital, while also laying the groundwork for IP-addressable advertising. Mostly this suggests that local TV, which has always been geo targeted, will provide better data on consumption characteristics of individual programs. To stay up to scratch with these demands, local broadcasters need robust inventory management systems to manage customized audience segments.

Great strides have been made in streamlining ad buying and selling processes over the last 20 years, from proposals to orders, through to scheduling, ad insertion, and delivery measurement. The piece that’s still largely missing for broadcast media is extending that workflow efficiency into the post-sale stage.

At the end of the day running an OTT channel can be a complete game changer for broadcasters and gives them the opportunity to become a D2C provider with a lot of detailed data on the end consumer.

PlayBox Technology provides Cosmos SaaS OTT solutions which can scale up to serve large numbers of viewers for major events at noticeably short notice. Why not book a free online demo and see what Cosmos can provide for your OTT needs.