6 Reasons to Buy and NOT Build Your Own OTT Platform
The world of video streaming has exploded over the last few years with several new content providers launching their own OTT apps — both regionally and globally.
In addition to the OTT industry, other market sectors relying on video streaming such as Ed Tech, Fitness, Wellness, and e-Shopping also saw a considerable increase in engagement and consumption.
If we take a step back and go behind the scenes, when a company decides to launch a streaming-heavy product, a common question that comes up during the design phase is -
“Should we build or buy”?
Different stakeholders have differing opinions on this question, as you can imagine. The product and business teams might want to buy to launch faster to market, while the engineering teams might be more inclined to build and own the tech stack.
While both opinions have pros and cons, in this article, we examine why you should buy and not go down the build route when thinking of launching a video streaming-heavy product.
Let’s go!
Requires Diverse Skillsets For a Complex Ecosystem
Streaming video over the Internet consists of several technologies that require different skill sets to build, maintain, and, significantly, scale.
A typical video streaming pipeline consists of the following components -
- Live, linear, and on-demand video ingestion.
- Metadata and artwork management and delivery.
- Transcoding video into multiple bitrates and resolutions for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) Streaming.
- Packaging the content for delivery via HLS or DASH
- Digital Rights Management
- Storage and redundancy
- Quality Checks.
- Delivery via one or more CDNs
- Stress and Load Testing of the Streaming Infrastructure.
- Building playback applications on popular platforms such as Web, Android, iOS, Chromecast, Android TV, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, Apple TV, Roku
- Monetization using Ads, Subscriptions, and Pay-per-view constructs.
- Login mechanisms.
- Search, Discovery, and Recommendation Engines.
- Data and Analytics
- Marketing tools (Promo Codes, Push Notifications, etc.)
Now, it’s evident from this list that you either need to hire a large team with diverse skill sets that will build the entire tech stack or buy the technology from specialized vendors and assemble the different pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle!)
The first option (building from scratch) will take a long time, require training and upskilling, and bring all the difficulties of building from scratch. The payoff might be fantastic, but it will take a lot of time and energy to get it right on the first shot.
The second option (using multiple vendors) brings in the problems of interoperability and coordination which is a challenge by itself! If you purchase transcoding tech from Vendor X and packaging tech from Vendor Y, you need to ensure that X and Y play well with each other!
High Operational Costs
After building and launching your product, you enter the maintenance, operations, and scaling phase. In this phase, you need access to granular data from your entire pipeline to ensure that your platform is
- up and running 24x7,
- scalable and can handle intermittent spikes in the load,
- configured with alerts and take your attention to the correct problems and not towards noise in the system.
Apart from the tech challenges, you would need to build an L1 & L2 support team that can handle customer queries and solve issues as they arise.
All of these costs add up very quickly as you scale and might be unviable for a content provider to own and operate.
Not Learning from Others’ Mistakes
When you build your own OTT platform, you are often constrained to the experience of your team and the learning opportunities they’ve had along their professional journeys.
Invariably, there will be hits and misses while building, and you’ll make many mistakes as you create everything from scratch. While this is a fantastic learning experience, you need to evaluate if your business can afford this cost.
Going with a turnkey platform provider eliminates this problem because they provide services to several companies across different market segments. So, these companies make more mistakes and learn from them faster while fixing and hardening their product.
And you, as a customer, benefit from being part of that constantly evolving ecosystem.
Access to the Latest Tech
Going with a turnkey OTT provider gives you access to the latest technologies because your platform vendor needs to stay current to grow their business. These might be advances in transcoding, video streaming, DRM, video players, data, analytics, and so many parts of the OTT streaming pipeline that can greatly enhance user experience!
As your vendor tests and integrates new technologies and protocols, you immediately have the option to upgrade or buy this at a fraction of the cost and time you would incur to build it yourself.
No time to focus on Content, Growth, and Marketing
Success in OTT typically comes down to three things — Content, Technology, and Marketing. Showing the right content to the right audience at the right time is a recipe for success.
And to do this, you need a growth and marketing team with access to the correct data from your video streaming platform.
For example,
- To plan their content acquisition, they need to know which genres perform well in specific geographies and market segments.
- To plan their push notifications, they might want to know which actor is currently famous in, let’s say, Mumbai.
In such situations, it will be a good idea to use a Video SaaS platform to handle the technology and provide the data while your team drives hard on content, growth, and marketing.
Else, you might find yourself stretching your resources (money and people) too thin.
Inability to Access Lower Prices
A hidden and often overlooked benefit of going with a turnkey video SaaS platform provider is the access to lower prices for technology than what you would get in the open market.
For example, on CDN rates, you would get a pretty raw deal if you are starting up and cannot commit to a large CDN usage upfront.
But, choosing a turnkey vendor gets you the vendor’s pre-negotiated rates along with managed services and maintenance included!
Summing it up,
There are both pros and cons to building/buying your OTT platform, and every company has to balance different factors while making a decision.
If you are in the process of deciding what to do and how to launch your OTT platform (or optimize your current one), please get in touch with our OTT experts at Airtel IQ Video.
We would be glad to set up a 30 min deep-dive with you to understand your needs, aspirations, and pain points and figure out how we would partner and contribute to your success.
Please fill up this form (https://forms.gle/hs42y8JNATDfGEkL8) and we’ll get in touch with you.
Until next time, happy streaming!
