Global OTT revenues are steadily growing, reaching $83 billion in 2019, with $16 billion estimated to have been added in 2020. Hence, the OTT VOD market is nothing but a reasonable investment. Consumer behavior, demand for choice, and evolving interactions are transforming the industry. The dynamic nature of OTT makes this industry unlike traditional broadcast, and hence, far from the point of saturation. Any OTT platform with the right value proposition and a backend designed for extensibility can indeed achieve success.
Article
Expert-Built or BIY: Choosing your OTT Strategy
Selecting between an in-house OTT backend or an expert built one.
Companies aiming for a long-term OTT strategy face a quandary. The choice of building their OTT platform from scratch themselves or to leverage expert partners with a proven technology stack. Both strategies have their issues and benefits. Building an in-house platform from scratch might seem like a sensible choice. Yet, getting stuck in the process due to high costs, long development cycles, or even ending up with a monolithic non-scalable platform isn’t uncommon. Unless a company has spare resources and plenty of experience in the OTT industry, seeking expert-built customizable solutions as a base seems more objective.
Establishing an OTT infrastructure can be challenging; the multi-staged process needs to be designed with the utmost consideration for workflows and maximum automation. From ingestion and management to security and distribution, each step needs careful consideration. Companies not only want to give the best QoS and QoE to the viewers, but they also want streamlined workflows for stakeholders behind the scenes.
What if you had the freedom to enjoy the best of both worlds? Where you leverage an array of standard and customizable services with the capability to develop your bespoke services, all within a shared technology stack. Axinom offers you this freedom through Axinom Mosaic, a unique platform that standardizes all significant steps in the digital content supply chain workflows through independent yet connected services. Mosaic decouples each major workflow step into services that fit together through frontend and backend libraries and with external services through supplied APIs.
Let’s have a look at the different processes, functions, expectations from a platform and what Axinom Mosaic offers:
| Process | Function | Solution Consideration | Axinom Mosaic Solution |
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Content |
Media assets are ingested into a processing system. |
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Content |
Premium content is processed, prepared, and protected. |
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Content |
Media assets are managed and assigned relations, including monetization. |
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Content |
Provisioning of access to media assets for end-users in the frontend. |
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Integration |
Integration of own or third-party services. |
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Bespoke |
Build your own services or integrate existing services. |
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A collaborative strategy towards building OTT platforms solves most of the challenges faced by companies. It combines the platform’s ambitions and requirements with a proven technology stack from an experienced vendor. The stack, oriented for future growth, should allow for customizations and in-house operation and development take-over.
Benefits of an expert leveraged strategy:
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Expertise and modularity
In-house creation can yield good results only if there is a vision that is backed by domain expertise. In-house development endeavors require vast experience in carrying out such software development projects of scale.Companies building their own OTT platform usually find themselves with a tightly-coupled monolithic architecture, which is highly dependent on other components and is non-scalable. On the contrary, an industry expert understands the need for a modular architecture that allows for high scalability and easy maintenance as faulty services can be easily isolated, debugged, and deployed in a fraction of time.
Furthermore, a collaborative strategy enables easy transfer of technical skills and an easy in-house takeover by the time the platform matures.
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Faster time to market
Contrary to the long development cycles of an in-house OTT platform, an expert built platform can be launched in a fraction of time. Subject to the level of complexity, customization, and integrations involved.Platforms built leveraging a modern approach allows for intelligent and automated workflows for ingestion, management, security, and distribution. It is also paired with an orchestration of content and workflows based on predefined conditions for business models, formats, geography, devices, and more. This reduces the time-to-market for the platform and the content immensely.
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Pre-integrations
A crucial factor for an OTT back-end is the integrations, with own or third-party systems, and the availability of standard APIs for future integrations. Usually, systems built in-house are limited in their integration capabilities, leading to inefficient workarounds.Partners with extensive experience in the industry are well aware and proficient in carrying out the needed integrations with their own or third-party systems.
Axinom, a provider of best-of-breed solutions for OTT content management and protection, is well-versed in building OTT backends. The Axinom Mosaic platform gives you complete freedom to mix and match services as needed. Making it as simple as selecting what you need, building as you expand, and paying as you scale.
"Axinom proved to understand our strategic goals and our vision establishing a distinct positioning on the cluttered market, which was important in the process of selecting a reliable partner.
Amit Goenka CEO - International Business ZEE5
Zee5 serves millions of users globally using a CMS powered by Axinom. The services manage thousands of hours of international and regional content, linear channels, many languages, over 100 regions, multiple payment providers, and several integrations.
"Axinom CMS is one of the most flexible and modular end-to-end OTT management platforms we’ve seen on the market. Their system will empower us to automate and simplify our content management workflows while improving scalability and robustness of our OTT platform."
Tony Huidor VP - Products & Digital Operations Cinedigm
With a future-proof content management system built using Axinom Mosaic services, providers can manage digital assets, associated metadata, integrations, and much more. The system has the potential to be extended in-house to grow with the growing business and operational requirements. Axinom provides ample aids such as developer training, support, and documentation to help such a scenario.
