The Game of Time
In the age of abundant video, content discovery has and will be the next battleground for digital video players
This is my third piece on OTT and content discovery. You can read the first part here and the second part here

The OTT platforms have mastered the art of building an envious content catalogue, first by licensing content and then by producing it. This was supported by a marketing blitzkrieg to increase awareness and build a loyal consumer base. While this has been a good run for OTT platforms, my analysis (read Netflix analysis here) on the numbers for Netflix show that the rate of adding new paying customers is getting slower — and costlier.
This may not serve as a tell-tale sign of near-stagnation to come but organisations today must lookout for changes in their business economics. After mastering content production and building a competitive catalogue, the big question is — what is the next source of competitive advantage for OTT players?
It is the consumers’ undivided attention.
Game of Time
The next battleground for OTT platforms will not be to bring the customers to their platform but to keep them on it. Customers will stay on a platform if they continuously find relevant content to watch. The operative words are ‘find’ and ‘relevant’. And in that order.
The realisation of the importance of ‘finding content’ will come when platforms reset their competitive view. Platforms are not just competing with other industry players.
A deeper understanding of customer behaviour shows platforms are competing with any activity that takes away customers’ time from the screen. This includes studying, sleeping, working and any other activity. It is a ‘Game of Time’
Therefore, for OTT platforms to measure the relevance of their content and customer loyalty, they must look at their ‘share of time’ in the lives of a consumer. At the customer engagement level, nothing else matters.
The first step to this is content discovery, both the efficiency and effectiveness of it. eMarketer research shows the considerable time spent in searching for content vs viewing and how surprisingly this ratio is skewed against the digital video platforms.
The high ratio of time spent searching vs viewing must be worrying for the platforms. Customers have a low attention span and every minute of additional search time increases the risk of the customer switching to a different platform or worse, to a different activity.

Although the OTT platforms have made a start in this direction — user interfaces were tweaked to aid discovery, multiple recommendation categories were created and information layouts were changed for more engaging teaser information — but there is a long way to go.
Catalogue-as-an-asset
The principal change required is how the content catalogue is treated in the organisation. The focus on content discovery necessitates that the content catalogue is treated as an asset.
From the existing focus of increasing the asset base by constantly adding to it, the core competency of the organisations will have to shift to sweating the existing catalogue. This would redefine what the organisation considers a success, how to measure it, reorder its priorities, outline which functions & roles will be central to this transformation.
Given how drastic this change is likely to be, it will require detailed planning and deft execution. It will not be surprising to see the changing roles of sales, marketing, finance and content production
· Share of the focus of marketing would be less on ATL marketing and more on in-platform. This would require intense collaboration with the technical teams to achieve the newly inaugurated content discovery targets
· Traditional metrics of new customer acquisition will remain but the assessment of customer behaviour will change
· Levers of customer experience will move away from the singular changes to the UI and move to an intricate linkage between technology-based recommendations in the back-end and the design-led user experience on the front end
· Traditional customer journeys will have to adapt to suit the platform-specific customer journeys and touchpoints
· As the pace and volume of new content addition (via licensing or creation) sober down, the content production team will have to relook at their approach of measuring the value of content
· Value measurement will now have to consider the long-term potential of the content and marginal cost to increase its relevance by reaching newer audiences. It is quite likely that organisations will set up a distinct team with the requisite skill-set and access to information, allowing them to define and execute the new approach of measuring content value.
