Companies that use business intelligence to make data-driven decisions are 6% more profitable than their competitors. OTT players are among them due to the challenges of personalizing the user experience and acquiring new content and audiences.
However, out-of-box BI solutions are more about convenient monitoring. Although custom BI technologies help companies grow both vertically and horizontally, OTT enterprises hesitate to employ them — because of time, costs, and complexity.
Here’s why investing in Oxagile business intelligence development might be worth it.
Enhance business performance
Increase ARPU
For the average revenue per user to grow, each of them should find their way to the content stream they can’t resist. But catering to all possible users in all accessible areas with various titles wouldn’t work for two reasons: too random and too expensive.
BI helps you to identify the needs and wants of each user, group them by audiences, and nourish them with niche and spot-on content. Recommendations become specific and data-driven: for example, children of 6 and 10 would get different, but still age-appropriate content.
Reduce churn rate though relevant offers
The more on-target your recommendations are, the better your first-time users convert. The challenge here is to keep the experience worth continuing. Understanding what you did right to retain a user is crucial.
Analyzing the data on the conversion cycle can tell you if the subscription process is friction-free. Maybe your free trial period is too short, and people watch intensively but never convert once it’s over. Or, the price of the ad-free version is too high, and the long-term users are not eager to upgrade.
To know the exact reason behind each conversion or a churning case, you can pick out custom reports on periods preceding the event. Based on these insights, you can make your offers more well-founded, and work on prolonging lifetime value of each user — by addressing what made some of them leave.
Provide hyper-personalized user experiences
The key to viewer satisfaction is personalization. It is not only about forecasting what a user wants at the moment but giving them a choice over-usage preferences. Such preferences may include flexible subscription options or a preferred ad exposure level.
To learn what your business model lacks in terms of user experience, you can consult BI data. It allows you to see and employ previously unrecognized patterns of conventional recommendation algorithms. BI could point out new revenue channels you never knew existed for your platform.
For instance, it’s the BI that discovers that millions of OTT users prefer a cheaper, but ad-supported experience, or that 37% of users binge-watch shows during their work hours.
Accelerate decision-making
Transform data into statistics quicker
As an OTT provider, you already have a potential goldmine of data on your hands. Conversions, revenues, user behaviors, views per any imaginable piece of content. The one thing left is to structure it into clusters and include in reports for comparative analysis.
Before, you would need months to process data from millions of users, and in the era of business intelligence, you need hours. Visualizing numbers in a readable format are also not time-consuming anymore — custom reports of your choice are generated automatically on demand.
Make decisions faster
To cut time on decision making, the process should be understandable and accessible to all stakeholders. Imagine if, in your decision journey, each participant would see only the metrics crucial for their approval: conversions for marketers, budgets for producers, etc.
That is what BI-enabled data visualization is all about — cohesive UI, self-explaining charts, and collaboration features. Before getting to the dashboards of your colleagues, AI-driven rule-based system breaks the data down into meaningful clusters.
Data verification becomes faster because the employees and executives can use instant BI reporting on their own. The system hides unrelated info, recognizes the patterns that are normal (view statistics, engagement, new subscribers), and notifies you of anomalies like a sudden churn spike — for you to know it’s time to act.
Predict trends and changes in user behaviors
Numbers gathered by BI reflect the current state of your platform and present a sustainable basis for analytics. Seeing the real-time data flow, you are in a position to spot a deviation in content performance or viewers’ behavior far earlier than it will be mentioned in quarterly reports.
BI feeds the data to the machine learning, which finds user patterns, like watching crime shows at night or binging on Friends during the holiday season.
Based on multiple grouped behavior scenarios, the BI system can find places for improvement and build predictions of viewer preferences. For example, if you are releasing a new show — machine learning will estimate the possible engagement.
Minimize risks
Eliminate human error
Business intelligence done right excludes the nightmares of a human factor. A human error means loss of ad revenues, releases off schedules, and damaged image. Hired specialists don’t secure you from dealing with missed calculation errors and forgotten corrections.
In BI systems, statistics are gathered automatically, and there is no need for constant human supervision on the process. If there is an abnormal instance registered in the real-time data, you are notified instantly, without waiting for someone to notice. The collected data is always the latest — no messed up doc versions.
Optimize costs
OTT is a date-tied business where the competition never sleeps. Release after release, you are bound to deliver a consistent experience. Such a high bar requires producing original high-quality content, and crafting already existing shows into a desirable offer.
Overcoming such challenges regularly raises the question of costs and sufficiency. Does the content you provide has reasonable production value for the targeted audiences? Does it ignite purchase urgency?
Machine learning-enabled BI provides you with answers based on previous content performance. You can follow its correlation to the production costs and the overall state of the business at a given moment. Compared to earlier releases, you will see if your planned investments are more likely to pay off or not.
BI ensures you stay in the game
Business continuity in OTT means updates should arrive rapidly, the demand should stay high, and you should never run out of content offers. This is a lot of ‘shoulds’ to stick to and hardly a task for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution.
THE Custom BI system takes into consideration a whole range of factors depending on your business model. The audience, region, regulation compliance, content type — you name it, and a custom ML-powered BI solution will offer a tailor-made statistic on it in a few clicks.
Nina Smith 
Nicola Holder