The Summer of Sports is here: Tips for delivering a seamless OTT experience
As we gear up for a busy summer of sports, it’s not just the athletes who need to be on top of their game. We’ve got a big opportunity to reach new users and keep them coming back into our OTT apps. Let’s not forget though, handling the tech side of things during high-profile events can be a real challenge. In this blog we’re taking a look at the summer of sports, and not just how we can find and handle big new amounts of users, but offer them the best experience possible.
Using social media and athletes for acquisition
Social media is a powerhouse when it comes to driving user acquisition, especially during the summer of sports. By leveraging platforms where your audience already hangs out, you can create a seamless transition from their feeds to your application. Sharing clips in both 16x9 and 9x16 resolutions ensures that your content fits perfectly whether they’re scrolling on a phone or watching on a bigger screen. Athletes, with their massive followings and influence, can be your secret weapon. Collaborate with them to share exclusive content, behind-the-scenes footage, or even live streams directly from your app. This not only drives traffic but also adds a personal touch that fans love. It builds a brand.
Now, you don’t need to do this all by yourself. Leveraging tools that can create clips and immediately share them to social media for you are incredibly powerful. Tools like SpotON, with a very low entry barrier, allow you to easily curate and find the best moments in live streams immediately when they happen. If you get too many clips to handle, a more automated solution like WSC Sports offers might then be a better bet for your use case. Of course, working with athletes to create content is a whole different beast and requires more of a personal touch. It is however still one of the best ways to gain traction, as organic content will generally always beat artificial.
To give you a concrete example: set up a system where you show sneak-peaks of personalised content from athletes on social media. Want to watch the whole thing? It’s available in your application. Some might be free of charge, with or without advertising in front or behind it. Some might be behind a paywall. Teasing content this way gives users just enough to want more, which they can easily access directly from your own app. User acquired!
Seamless experience is key
So a user has found your content. They’re hooked and want to see more. To make this transition effortless, we need to ensure that the journey from social media to your app is as smooth as possible. If they’ve previously interacted with content from a specific athlete, that content should be front and center. Even better, if users interact with content on social media, deeplink them into that same content. Don’t require users to first find the content that they were engaging with just a moment ago. Make it seamless.
To then keep them engaged, you can leverage recommendation algorithms that suggest content similar to what they’ve already shown interest in. This not only keeps users hooked but also enhances their overall experience by making it feel personalised and intuitive. Additionally, ensure your app has a strong presence across all screens — whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or smart TV. By maintaining a consistent and intuitive interface across all devices, users can effortlessly switch between them, always finding themselves in a familiar and engaging environment.
Making sports look good while being cost-efficient
To deliver an optimal viewing experience, it’s crucial to match the frame rate to the sport’s nature. High-movement sports like soccer benefit from 50 frames per second (fps) for smooth action, users actually want to see the ball rolling. On the other hand, events like the Tour de France can suffice with 25 fps. While they cycle fast, you won’t notice much of a difference in the action between 25 and 50 fps. Additionally, consider the device: mobile screens can use lower resolutions to save data, while smart TVs should use higher resolutions for a better experience.
To achieve all this in a cost-effective way, using advanced codecs like H.265 (HEVC) instead of H.264 can significantly reduce bitrate while maintaining or improving video quality, cutting down on streaming costs. For even better efficiency, AV1 is an option, though its adoption is still limited due to varying device support. By selecting the right codec, frame rate, and resolution for each device, we ensure high-quality streaming that is both visually stunning and cost-effective. After all, that’s what we want to achieve: happy users enjoying a quality stream, while not letting costs run out of hand.
Handling the influx of users
I could write entire blogs about this topic, but let’s keep it short and to the point. Handling the influx of users from your awesome work on socials is a task on its own. But it doesn’t have to be too difficult, if you stick to a few core principles in your technology choices:
- Use a CDN for your streams, preferably a multi-CDN setup
- Implement correct caching on your frontend and backend responses
- Use auto-scaling techniques on your infrastructure where possible
- Be mindful of performance during development
Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? Okay, maybe it does. They are in some cases very open-ended too, and in detail require a lot effort. The important take-away is that you need to actually think about handling scale, and base your technology choices around it. The actual implementation can differ a lot depending on your tech. The CDN(s) you use may depend on availability in your operating region. The cloud you use may offer different options for scaling and handling cache effectively. All I can say is: be mindful of your choices. And if you need any help with that, you know where to find me ;).
We need to make money too
Getting to the final chapter of this blog, we cannot leave without talking about actually making all of this profitable. Sports rights by themselves are not cheap to begin with, let alone the fact that you have to build, maintain and monitor all of these OTT applications and video streams. There are different ways to monetise your content, and you may even mix-and-match to best suit your use case and expectations from your user base.
One common approach is the ad-supported model (AVOD), where viewers access content for free but watch advertisements during the stream. This can be a great way to attract a larger audience while generating revenue through ad placements. Another option is offering individual events for purchase, allowing users to pay for only the content they are interested in without committing to a full subscription. Lastly, the subscription model (SVOD) provides a steady revenue stream by offering unlimited access to all content for a recurring fee. Combining a lower-priced SVOD tier with Ads can also be very beneficial. This allows you to give users the option to pay the higher tier for no ads at all, while also offering the option to pay less with a limited amount of ads. Users like choice after all, and may value money over the time watching ads.
Diving deeper into ad-supported options, there are several advanced methods to consider. The easiest to achieve and implement is Client-Side Ad Insertion (CSAI), with the only implementation needed being directly into your applications. Important to note though, is that it can be affected by ad blockers. CSAI is also not particularly effective for live streams, as you actually need to hard-stop the live stream for mid-rolls, only to restart it again after ads. For this reason, CSAI is often only used for pre-rolls with live content.
Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) on the other hand integrates ads directly into the video stream, providing a seamless experience and reducing the risk of ad blocking. It does require additional capabilities of your live streaming platform, making it important to account for being able to scale to your required amount of users. Integrations with the SSAI-offerings from the likes of Yospace or Google DAI can be leveraged to handle part of that load for you.
For a more personalised touch, and more important, much easier scaling solution, Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) uses a combination of client-side and server-side technology to insert ads in a way that feels more integrated with the content. Learning more about this and other options for (ad-supported) monetisation, you can read right here:
Are you ready for the summer of sports?
That’s a lot of moving parts, agreed. You’ve got to be able to find users, or rather, have users find you. Using effective social media campaigns and collaborating with athletes is a great way to acquire new users. Keeping them in your app is then an important job, meaning you have to be able to offer them a seamless and smooth viewing experience with content they want to watch. And with proper quality too. Because a happy, returning user is the best way to actually make profit, regardless of the monetisation strategy you use.
Are you ready for the summer of sports, or still in need of a bit of help? You know where to find me if you need a sparring partner. If you’ve already got it all in the bag, that’s awesome! So definitely shoot me a message if you want to show that off too. Wishing you all loads of sports fun!
