It’s not news to us that in the last decade, the means of content consumption have tremendously changed. What was once restricted to scheduled television programming, books, monthly magazines, cinema releases etc., is now taken in through plethora of fascinating digital mediums. Your social life has now made a complete shift to social media platforms. Your school and college education involves digital methods to teach and communicate; and if that doesn’t work, you could learn from countless amazing educators from across the world through many platforms. And similarly, OTT platforms have become the go to place for people worldwide to enjoy their desired content from the comfort of their home.
Simply put, OTT or Over the Top platforms refer to websites and applications that provide the users with motion picture content like movies, television shows, web series, documentaries etc. to stream over the internet. The service is subscription based, unlike the traditional cable TV. The global rise in popularity of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video over the last few years is evident in their growing market of over 2 billion users. So what makes an OTT service so popular?
While it accommodates to the modern hectic lifestyle by providing its users an abundant collection of content from all across the world and in all sorts of genres at the tip of their fingers for them to enjoy at any time they fancy, it’s a great market for creators since OTT platforms offer a much bigger and global audience and caters to the specific interests of millions of people who could easily reach and appreciate their production. And to add to all that, getting your work broadcasted on these platforms is generally much cheaper and easy compared to pitching it to various TV media houses and theaters; where luckily even if it gets picked, the audience reach is limited to that of the broadcasting company. So with OTT, even small budget productions have an opportunity to screen their work to just as big of an audience.
Taking into consideration the many benefits of OTT, there is still a major obstacle that arises for creators: competing with millions of choices to grab the viewers’ attention to their product. Since the OTT platforms have a worldwide audience, they also have creators from across the globe; which results in a much bigger crowd to standout from. So what approach should you have while planning a movie, a web series or a documentary for OTT?
A step would be to work with a good production team for your project. The professionals who are well-researched and study the analytics of what does and doesn’t work for OTT could guide you and help you with every aspect of your production to ensure a better result for your product.
