The Streaming journey for Content Owners

Content owners across the globe are faced with a rapidly evolving streaming subscription and AVOD service offerings as a result of consolidation in the media industry landscape. There is a clear emergence of a small number of large streaming services that will dominate the space as a result of the consolidations, such as Warner Media purchasing Discovery, Comcast NBC Universal Peacock, Amazon Prime purchasing of MGM, Disney+ and Hulu, in addition to Netflix that is the current market leader in this space. These large streaming providers have the deployed a dual growth strategy of reaching new audiences via Direct to Consumer (DTC) offerings sold to the individual consumers as well as reaching audiences seamlessly via sell thru on Cable/Telco and aggregation platforms. They are able to successfully execute this strategy though a substantial investment in home grown solutions and custom integrations into telco/cable/aggregator platforms. Their investment is justifiable in the context of the large content library they own as well as the large global reach of services they can deliver.

Smaller content owners are now faced with the challenge of executing a similar strategy with a much smaller budget – but how can they achieve this and remain competitive in the market? To ensure their viability they need to reach new audiences via DTC as well as preserve the current revenues from their license rights to telcos/cable/aggregators. The current distributing of their content via telco/cable/aggregators does not enable control and insights on the content processing as well as audience metrics on the consumption of their content. Do they follow the same strategy as the larger streaming services where they need to deploy an over the top service that can be offered to individual consumers as well as sold via the telco/cable/aggregators bundled into their data service or as a add on subscription service, while preserving the common AV pipe and access to consumer insights? With the exponential growth of OTT subscriptions, what does the streaming platform need to deliver in terms of consumer experience and how can they engage sports and event fans on the scale they need?