Benefits of AI in OTT Industry

Over the Top (OTT) content distribution is currently a big trend. It has influenced a viewer’s audio and video content consumption patterns. In spite of all its benefits, customer acquisition, as well as retention is a big challenge for most OTT players. Why? Because there are several industry players who offer original and interesting content at attractive prices. Increasing churn rate is another challenge faced by these OTT players. Offering an entertaining content, and a rich user experience that sticks on seems like a herculean task. Thus, OTT players are slowly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI). This post explores, how media and broadcasting industry is reaping benefits of AI.

How are OTT Brand Players are Capitalizing on AI?

• Gaining Insights on Consumer Behavior: How? Predictive analysis is one of the important pillars of AI. It focuses on a viewer’s viewing habits, such as the type of the content being watched, the time of the day a particular content is being watched, and when he/she may switch over to another content. Based on all its observations, the AI offers better recommendations to the viewer. Since last few months, Netflix has been enthralling its viewers by making a good utilization of Dynamic Optimizer ( an AI application) for content recommendation. A good AI-driven platform helps enrich a user experience, as well as reduce bounce rates.
  
  Today, various AI platforms like Conviva is enabling OTT players to promote their SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand), pay TV-businesses, as well as AVOD ( Ad-supported Video on Demand) packages efficiently. These AI platforms offer an actionable intelligence, which helps an OTT business to understand the level of customer engagement and experience, and exploit it for his business benefit.

• Decide Better Content Pricing: In future, an OTT owner may entirely depend on an AI prediction to determine the success of a particular content, and develop a better pricing. How? It may enable a platform owner to gauge the popularity of movie, song, music album, or a TV series. Also, it may help them decide the time of release, a time slot to showcase the program, or attitude of viewers towards the particular program, when their sentiments are high, etc. In addition to this, when combined with a social media, the AI can also provide a prediction on chances of the success of the new title, as well as whether a particular price strategy is perfect or not.

• Conceptualization Made Easy: There are areas, where AI is helping to minimize human efforts. Developing a movie trailer is one of the most challenging tasks. In 2016, an AI platform (IBM Watson) was used for the first time to develop a trailer for a horror movie Morgan. The AI platform launched an in-depth analysis of the movie, where it tracked various emotions like love, freight, and eeriness, as well as conducted an audio analysis, too. The result – an impressive trailer, which was cut by a human editor.

• Optimization of OTT Delivery Network: AI is also set to optimize the OTT delivery. That sounds interesting! Isn’t it? At present, a viewer experiences a lot of congested links, and weak connectivity or connectivity losses, due to the adoption of Internet Protocol (IP). The AI platform can monitor the content distribution infrastructure, as well as show the information flow. Also, it can suggest the improvements needed in the streaming, as well as the broadcasting network’s scalability.

As the scope of adoption is set to continue in 2018, the OTT players can avail more tangible benefits in return.