As production costs of content continue to rise, media companies must increase revenue and incentivise retention if they are to continue to grow their subscriber base year-on-year. A seamless platform, personalisation and ease of discovery should be considered as much a part of the driving force of a competing media provider as the content itself.
A seamless platform, personalisation and ease of discovery should be considered as much a part of the driving force of a competing media provider as the content itself.
When it comes to user experience, Netflix is the poster child: they were pioneers in creating interfaces to support playback on phones, tablets, and TVs successfully pre-empting the importance of seamless transitions between devices. In addition, Netflix has been able to continuously stay one step ahead of the game through their unrivaled ability to collect consumer behaviour data and leverage their findings to adapt their service to better suit their consumers’ needs.
For example, upon observing that many of their users were clicking to view the next episode after having watched the previous one, Netflix introduced their automatic ‘play next episode’ feature, which automatically played the next episode in a series after the current one had finished without the need for the consumer to click. The feature instantly improved the user experience, as it removed another source of friction from the ‘binge-watching’ experience.
What Netflix understands is that the key to an exceptional UI , is one that gets the user where they want to go in the least number of clicks, but it’s a model with which other players are still playing catch-up. Vodafone Portugal is one such player, describing its updated UI as ‘simpler, intuitive and intelligent’ in reference to its new features which include the ability to resume viewing at the point when it was interrupted.
What Netflix understands is that the key to an exceptional UI , is one that gets the user where they want to go in the least number of clicks.
Similarly, Sky Q has been driving towards a simple, frictionless UI, with recent updates including ‘simple, one-touch destinations’ for functions that help customers ‘find what they want to watch quickly and easily on any device.’
As well as the need to have an effective UI, consumers also increasingly expect to experience content discovery capabilities that connect them to content aligned with their personal interests. Users appreciate the relevance of content targeted to their tastes, as well as a presentation that feels as if the service provider understands and takes into consideration their needs.
With the availability of data that comes with a digital service, OTTs can leverage the data collected from their consumer’s actions to create a better more personalised offering. That is to say, every interaction the user makes with a service can be used to finetune the offer, from content commissions or library purchases to layouts and recommendations.
Returning to Netflix, the streaming platform has found an innovative way to do precisely this. In other words, after discovering that different users were drawn to different types of movie posters, they implemented an algorithm that ensured that users would see different artwork based on their previous viewing habits.
But the benefit of this extends beyond just improving the experience for the consumer, in that it also promises to provide an extra, valuable revenue source for host platforms.
The benefits of such a user experience extend to greater monetization opportunities too . The most notable example of this is sponsored UI . Here, UX platform design can make it possible for content owners to sell the premium real estate of their UI to brands. Sponsored rows, backgrounds, categories, and landing pages can be injected into the user interface, dynamically.
This is particularly relevant considering that streaming platforms have to contend with an unwillingness amongst viewers to sit through pre-and mid-roll ads (except in AVOD environments): with a programmatically sold UI, OTTs can open a up valuable avenue for generating ROI on expensive content acquisition rights in a way that doesn’t interrupt the viewing experience.
As the wave of pay TV operators launching services based on Android TV (140 globally according to Irdeto) rises the need to differentiate based around the UX has never been greater.
When Greek telco WIND Hellas launched an IPTV product in 2018 it was last to market with a zero customer base.
Based on an Android TV core, WIND’s proposition united pay TV, DTT and catch-up channels. Within a year it had gained 10% of the market; “with significant churn reduction we are on track to grow rapidly,” Riedl said.
WIND Hellas adopted the principal of Unified (or Universal) search and discovery which integrates multiple video sources into a single experience. The concept brings added value to pay TV operators wanting to brand themselves as the user’s go-to content aggregator and, in theory, delivers an engaged consumer who doesn’t need to go ‘off platform’ for their content.
While the scenario is seen as the strongest survival tactic for pay TV in its war against cord cutting, it multiplies the complexity of the content recommendation system. Even if machine learning is used to drive individual content recommendations, based on time of day, location, device, and previous activity, the sheer scale of available content renders traditional tools grid or tree-based content catalogues, insufficient going forward.
Voice-based interaction could be the answer to the too much choice conundrum. Vodafone Portugal has introduced a voice-driven search engine to its UI that uses natural language recognition and combines a number of search criteria including the name of a title, the names of actors, date, content genre and others.
Sophisticated voice input helps users discover content in the way they think about content. For example, the system should be able to match complex queries like ‘What’s the film with Peggy from EastEnders and Kenneth Williams?’. Voice-based unified search and discovery should ‘know’ who the individual user is and provide them with a set of personalised results from across their entertainment choices regardless of source.
The stage beyond this is using tools to discern the viewer’s emotional state to refine content recommendations. Ruwido, for instance, has developed a system that detects a user’s mood while interacting with voice assistants and uses that (along with myriad other data points about the individual) to propose relevant content.
Other approaches are exploring taking data from biosensors including eye-scanning heat maps, heart rate monitors and EEG headsets – anything that triggers emotion - to build an ‘empathic AI’ that can be trained to understand user’s desires and respond accordingly. The goal is to tailor content in a way which feels intuitive to the consumer but as the industry edges toward this it will need to tread with caution to ensure users do not feel aggressively targeted or privacy invaded. Gaining the trust of a user is essential to building brand loyalty.
