Streaming services have seen a huge increase in the demand for their services. This demand has presented several challenges as well as opportunities for growth if these opportunities are taken advantage of. In this article, we are going to look at how streaming services can adapt to the increase in demand and how they can take advantage of the opportunities it presents.
Deal with Streaming Issues and Availability
The increased service uptake of streaming services has led to problems with ensuring the service is available to everyone who needs it, no matter where they may be in the world. There are also issues of throttling or outage due to more bandwidth being used than the streaming service was prepared for, which is something Netflix was forced to do in the early days of the pandemic, when demand for its service massively increased almost overnight.
Some of the ways to solve these problems and ensure your customers have a great experience on your platform include increasing your bandwidth to deal with capacity issues, using data centres located closer to your customers to deal with latency, limiting live streaming, and reducing streaming quality.
Personalized Offerings
People are looking for high quality content that appeals to them or their households. What consumers need can range from educational, informational, or entertainment content. But, with so much content available, consumers can feel overwhelmed. To offer the best service possible, streaming services should have personal recommendation services.
There are several benefits of doing this, including the consumer getting access to content they actually like, as the streaming service gets to stand out by offering exactly what the consumer needs, and consumers stay on the platform because they are getting value for their money by staying subscribed to a streaming service.
Such personalisation can be done through the platform itself via content-personalisation engines or by reaching out to consumers through email or other means. The ability to recommend personalised content is what makes OTT services from companies like Red Bee stand out. Red Bee’s OTT solutions allow anyone from independent content creators to big corporations to distribute content to their audience by giving them the tools to do so. Their OTT solution also provides access to additional Red Bee services and third-party systems which can further enhance live streaming capabilities.
Increase Access
There are two main ways of increasing access to your platform: ensuring the fee is reasonable and making your service available on as many platforms as possible. As more people opt for streaming over TV, they will be shopping around for a cheaper service they can enjoy, and they are likely to choose you if your fees are reasonable.
They are also likely to choose your service if they can access it through a variety of platforms, including mobile, computer, and TV if possible.
Improve Customer Service
Improving the relationship between your business and your customers is one of the best ways to give them a good experience and ensure customer retention. As service uptake increases, you can expect a lot of questions from customers, especially if yours is a new streaming platform. Having qualified customer service agents to deal with this influx of questions or providing a knowledge base or wiki with answers to frequently asked questions are both great ways of dealing with this.
The demand for streaming services is increasing and there will be additional strain on these services to adapt to ensure they deal with capacity issues, an influx of new users, and availability of their service on as many platforms as possible.