Written by: Roshan Dwivedi
Technology and digital advancements have made geographical boundaries come to shrink. Consumers are accessing worldwide media; and reaching worldwide audience nowadays is just a matter of some clicks. You can reach an audience into any part of the world at lightning fast speed through mobile technology. But what’s difficult is, to make sure you succeed at the same speed.
Launching your OTT Platform into different geographies requires a lot of understanding about the market, existing competition and importantly the audience that you plan to cater to. You cannot always please a remotely located tribe with a strategy that worked locally for you. Entertainment has different meaning for different geographies and thus, preparing your OTT service for success in different geographical landscapes is essential.
There is a lot that we can learn from Netflix’s recent move of going global into many countries of the world. The OTT service has taken a lot of measures such as going completely local in some territories and even producing local originals to licensing heavily.
We at Muvi have helped many customers prep and launch their services into different geographies of the world. Having seen very closely what goes into preparing your platform to go global and what makes it succeed, we have summed up a series of actions that you can take to ensure a successful global OTT launch.
While having a localized strategy into markets you are launching is a definitive that comprises of things like acquiring and producing local content, product pricing and positioning, competition vetting, marketing strategy and tie-ups, preparing your platform technologically is also important so that your audience doesn’t get confused when they land up on your site or download your app, and are directed to the content they are familiar or identify with and are able to communicate and transact with you in their preferred modes. We at Muvi, take a look at the technological challenges and how we can help platform owners overcome the same –
Tips for a successful Global OTT Launch
1. Geo Blocking
As you might be aware, when you license content from your content partners, the license usually comes with a geographical condition attached to it, and you can only stream that piece of content in the geography you have licensed it for. So while going global, and local into other countries, it is very important you manage your content effectively or else you might run into trouble with your content providers. This management is typically done by Geo Blocking. Geo blocking allows you to block either your entire platform or only specific content in countries and regions you do not have the license for. Geo Blocking may also help you expand your international library and content and open it up to other regions where you have the license for, thus exposing a whole new geography to some fresh content that they might not have accessed before.
Muvi offers Geoblocking at both the levels, you can either block your entire platform from countries you are not entering or don’t have license for, and at the same time you can effectively create “content categories” and geo block that from countries you don’t have license to stream to. We obviously recommend option #2, via which you can effectively manage content from multiple countries and stream it locally or other regions where you have license to. To learn more about Geo Blocking feature offered by Muvi click here.
2. Multilingual
Understanding your audience, their values, their cultures and most importantly, their language is essential when planning a launch in a specific country. Your audience will understand and connect to you better when you speak to them in their language. Work with translators to offer your content on your websites/apps into local languages, and offer your viewers a choice of setting the same as their “default” language when they return. Local translations not only help you talk to your site visitors, it also has great SEO value and helps boost your site’s ranking on local search engines to the top!
This is a must have option for any OTT player entering other countries. Muvi offers a “translation” option that helps a platform owner translate their website and apps into multiple languages, while Muvi itself doesn’t do the translation, platform owners can download the English scripts of the platform and translate them into multiple languages at once and mass upload the same all from the backend, this way in 1-click your OTT Platform will be multi-geography ready! To learn more about translations and Multilingual features offered by Muvi, please click here.
Now that you are acquiring local and international content for your platform, the next question is what do you do with this content in countries and regions where you do have the streaming license for but the content is not a native of? Keeping it as it is in your library is not an effective solution. Similarly how do you optimize your international content for a local country? The best way to optimize international content for local audience is to add subtitles and get the content itself dubbed in regional languages. Your audience is hungry for content, and they would have most probably already consumed local content that you are licensing locally, however your star offering might just be an international piece of content that none of your local competitors have, and that is a great way to attract audience to your platform and to keep them glued to your platform month on month. Subtitles and dubbed audios have been a savior of many and have helped Hollywood rake in the $’s in non-English speaking countries. In India it jumped by over 92% in 2015 itself!
Muvi offers out of box support for subtitles & multiple audio tracks and platform owners can take advantage of this and offer their content with not only multiple subtitles, but also with multiple audio tracks so that it can be taken to countries and regions effectively with ease. To learn more click here.
4. Integrate with local Payment Gateways
Payment cultures are different in different parts of the world and there are different accessibilities. For example, there is a really less access to credit cards in African regions and south Asian countries like India have a culture of using payment wallets. Even Paypal, the universal payment gateway has restrictions in some parts of the globe. And thus, it is essential you study the payment cultures of each territory well and integrate with the most popular payment method of a specific region so that your customers find it easy to subscribers and pay for your services.
Payment integrations also bring in the threat to security and thus, at Muvi we ensure we provide you with a highly secure and credible payment gateway option integrated from the top global providers. Muvi also supports addition of Multiple payment gateways on a single platform as we understand a business may need more than one to work globally. To know more, click here.
5. Payments in local Currencies
Along with local payment gateways, there comes a restriction of dealing in currencies across borders. Not all of your audience will find it easy to pay in dollars or pounds. If they do, great, but in most cases people will only be comfortable trading in their native currencies and you certainly don’t want to miss out on that chunk of audience. Apart from adopting in for their language, content cultures, you should also be able to scale your platform to offer local currencies, in order to win over audience in specific territories.
Muvi offers support for offering your platform in multi currencies from US Dollars to Pounds and from Yuan, Yen to even BitCoins. You have the freedom of setting up your subscription or Pay Per View plans in local currencies, and setting up localized pricing as well for the country, thus preventing you from losses in case of currency fluctuations. Click here to learn more.
6. Capitalize On Local Events, Festivals & Holidays with Coupons & Promotions
Marketing your platform locally is important, your team and agency will have a strategy in place and will take the platform effectively across Digital and offline mediums, if not now very soon they may ask you to run discounts, offers and promotions that capitalize on local events, holidays and festivals. This is natural for most businesses and even you will run some sort of discounted offer or promotion, having a robust coupon engine is required that can help you generate and measure the effectiveness of such promotional and discounted offerings and measure their actual impact on the platform.
Muvi has a built in coupon engine that lets you seamlessly offer discounts, in terms of percentage or flat cash discounts whenever required and lure your customers into spending more on your platform. Muvi also has a well defined analytics engine that helps you track the effectiveness of such coupons. You have the option to generate single use unique coupons or else generate multi-use coupons and also setup an expiry date in the backend. Click here to learn more.
As we all know, having local content is one of the major keys to success while going international and entering into different countries. In the process you will have tie-ups with multiple content partners, each offering you their content to be put up onto your platform. With each content partner you may have a different deal, either it’s a flat all out license, or a revenue share, this keeps varying from partner to partner and your strategy.
As you grow, so will the partners and content and it will become a nightmare if you do have have effective ways of streamlining and managing all the content upload process as well as reports properly.
Thankfully with Muvi, you get a content partner portal option via which you can create personalized logins for each of your content pattern with which they can login and not only manage their own content in terms of adding, editing or deleting (of course with your approval) but also be able to view reports in terms of views, unique views and revenue their content has generated for them! All this completely automated with minimum intervention from your end! Click here to know more.
Conclusion
We focused and spoke majorly about technology, as technology is the key here, without which and the automation it brings in, it will be very difficult for a platform owner to effectively launch and rock at a multi-country, multi-geography platform all being managed and run centrally by it’s team at their home town!
Muvi is one such all-in-all OTT solutions provider that not only helps you plan your launch across borders but also ensures that you get out-of-the-box security and all the necessary features to mark a success.
Check out Muvi’s comprehensive range of features and offerings and understand how we can catalyze your OTT growth.
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