Production Houses moving from Cinema to OTT

OTT is by far the hottest word after COVID-19 since the pandemic hit. There’s OTT everywhere… on your TV, on your phones, on your laptops… it’s a universal form of content distribution and content consumption. Ad money is moving to OTT, subscription money is moving to OTT… OTT has become a money magnet, and everyone wants a piece of that pie.

In India so far, it’s Amazon, Hotstar and Netflix, who are far ahead of the other local players. They not only have the tech, but a head start in creating and distributing OTT content. But if you look at the market size and opportunity, it’s HUGE. A simple search will show hundreds of research studies for market size, top players so on, and so forth. The key question is how should Indian production houses become part of the OTT story and make the most of this OTT surge?

Here are some of the key aspects that production houses must take into consideration:

1] New content / Talent discovery: Unlike the traditional movies, OTT gives production houses a very wide playing field for creating different types of content at different production price points. With international players coming into production, the competition for talent and content is starting to heat up. Hence, it’s critical for production houses to build a steady scalable pipeline of talent. Technology should be leveraged to streamline this process of spotting content and talent.

2] Content packaging for OTT: Once the content is created it has to be packaged for optimal delivery of various distribution channels. Production houses have to think about how the customer will consume the content and via which content distribution channel. Some aspects of packaging to consider are:

• Device type (mobile, desktop, web, in-app, TV, etc.)
• Distribution channel type
• Content monetization model
• Geography content consumption
• Language (endpoint internet speed, cc, translation, etc.)

3] Content distribution channels: Content distribution, especially last-mile connectivity, is equally if not as important as the content itself. If the last mile delivery is not smooth, then it hampers the user experience thereby creating a drop in user consumption. One of the most critical aspects here is the tech that’s used for the distribution of the content. If production houses use someone like an Amazon, Netflix who also have their own content, then the production houses will end up competing with the content distributors themselves.

4] Content engagement analytics: Understanding what your viewers watch and what the content they are engaging with is extremely critical. This data can be used internally by production teams to create new content, recommendation of content to users, revenue tracking, etc. and share externally with Advertisers so that they can reach their audience at the right time and right place.

Here are some useful data points:

• Ad Opportunities
• Sessions and Sessions Duration
• Daily Unique Users
• HOV
• Distribution Channels
• Average Session HOV
• Total completions
• Geography
• Census Demographic information
• GBs of content delivered
• Episode / series level data for the above, etc.

Production houses must invest in systems that can provide such analytics at scale.

5] Business Operations Automation: There are number of teams that have to work in collaboration with each other, especially, revenue operations, finance, ad operations, etc. Most of the activities that these teams perform to leverage the same underlying data. Hence, ensuring that business, for example the one mentioned above, has to be consistently collected, processed and shared with various teams so that they are looking at the same data set.

Automating business operations ensures that there’s less human intervention in repetitive processes and teams can focus on value added activities that result in higher revenues and greater cost savings. These are some of the steps that India’s Production Houses can take as they up their OTT game!