Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth A video growth strategist’s guide to global expansion Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth A video growth strategist’s guide to global expansion Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth Evergent’s market-leading Integrated Revenue and Customer Management platform helps the world’s leading communication, media, and entertainment companies reduce time to market for products and services, simplify complex monetization models, and run backoffice processes more efficiently. Evergent’s customers include global media companies such as AT&T, Warner Media, SingTel and Etisalat, and leading media companies such as FOX and Sony Entertainment Television. Evergent is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and has offices in San Diego and Los Angeles and internationally in Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and Singapore. evergent.com Content: Brian Baumley, BLB Communications Design: Rohit Sen, UI/UX Designer, Evergent Illustration: https://icons8.com/ © 2021 Evergent Technologies, Inc. www.evergent.com Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth Table of Contents 02 Introduction 03 Meet the contributors 05 An OTT market brimming with opportunity 07 Got scale? (you’re gonna need it...) 11 Where to grow next 13 Making things personal 17 Business models were made for disrupting 21 Moving quickly to meet the moment 25 Contributing company profiles www.evergent.com Introduction For as far as OTT has come over the past decade, Introduction we are still very much at the dawn of the streaming era. What was once a digital hedge to cover all bases has become a priority for just about every market player. The stakes are substantial with an unending parade of entrants vying for consumer spend. Eager to make up for lost time, many are plotting ambitious global expansions that will demand scale, speed and flexibility, regional prowess and a healthy appetite for constant experimentation. It is perhaps the limitless potential strategies that can be deployed on the road to growth that has so many players questioning where to go from here. Advertising. Personalization. Partnerships. Data- driven promotional plays. Each has a role to play in the increasingly dynamic, highly-competitive OTT ecosystem. How will you earn your share? Are you prepping to launch a new offering? Searching for the next path to growth for a maturing service? Eager to reinvigorate a promising play that has plateaued? This eBook explores the paths to growth for OTT’s next market leaders. It shares the top five considerations on the minds of stakeholders with insight and commentary from some of the key players guiding growth trajectories for a range of OTT companies around the world. www.evergent.com 02 Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth Evergent’s “Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Meet the Subscription Growth” eBook features insights and perspectives from among the OTT ecosystem’s Contributors most prominent tech enablers. Dovile Trepkeviciute Partner Manager, Accedo Dovile is a global project and partner manager working globally and cross-functionally in the IT industry. Her role focuses on evaluating and establishing business and technology Kapil Chaudhry partnerships globally for the video CTO, Evergent streaming industry. Dovile started her career as a TV news journalist, Kapil spearheads software shaping communication skills and engineering initiatives, directing working under tight deadlines. global solution architecture and development teams. With more than 15 years of engineering management experience in the software, services and telecom industries, he provides technical direction on platform and innovative technology and solution Manoj Padmanaban selection. Kapil is the recipient of Head BD - Media & Entertainment, multiple technical excellence awards India at Amazon Web Services and has filed several patents. (AWS) Manoj has been a part of the Telecom, Media & Entertainment industry for over 23 years and has recently joined AISPL to head Business development for M&E in India. As a marketer and being consumer centric, he has been driving digital transformation across Media companies and even launched India’s first OTT platform. 03 www.evergent.com Meet the Contributors Paolo Cuttorelli VP & GM/APAC, Evergent Paolo brings 20 years of expertise and knowledge from the media and telco industries as well as a proven ability to forge long term strategic partnerships with large and complex accounts both in Asia Paul Pastor and globally. He previously served Chief Business Officer, Firstlight as head of account management Media / Cofounder, Struum for Asia at Brightcove and has held senior sales and professional Paul Pastor, an early leader in services roles at Quickplay Media Direct-To-Consumer services, is (acquired by AT&T) and Subex Ltd. currently Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer for Firstlight Media, a leading OTT platform provider and Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Struum, a soon to be launched SVOD aggregation platform backed Jim O’Neill by Michael Eisner’s Tornante Principal Analyst, Brightcove Company. Jim is principal analyst at Brightcove and editor of Videomind, an industry blog. He has worked in the online video industry for more than a decade and, prior to Brightcove, was principal analyst at Ooyala, an analyst with Parks Associates and editor of FierceOnlineVideo and FierceIPTV. www.evergent.com 04 Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth While a few giants have staked out early, dominant An OTT Market worldwide OTT market share, the game is far from over. According to Allied Market Research, Brimming with the global OTT market is projected to reach more than $1T by 2027, growing at an unstoppable Opportunity 29% CAGR. That should be welcome news for the droves of streaming video services eager to compete for ever-expanding share - Deloitte Insights estimates there are more than 300 such services already available in the U.S. alone. No matter how you slice it, opportunity abounds. Viewers are turning to a range of devices to consume OTT content, with smart TVs being the primary way streamers are accessing video, according to Statista. Roku, Amazon Fire TV and video game consoles follow close behind. 2020 saw a pandemic-fueled OTT surge with subscriptions and viewing times soaring. According to ABI Research, streaming services reported a significant growth in user bases throughout Q1. Comscore’s State of OTT report, which studies OTT consumption data from more than 75 services accounting for the overwhelming majority of OTT usage, stated that the number of households streaming content on OTT devices rose from 44 million per month before March 9, 2020 to roughly 300 million after. It stayed in the 300 million household range through at least the middle of 2020. The average home viewed more than 100 hours of OTT during April, with the three-month average of OTT viewing up by nearly 10% YoY from March through June 2020. 05 www.evergent.com An OTT Market Brimming with Opportunity High-profile OTT services launching during the year certainly found themselves in the right place at the right time. Whether this spike in interest and viewership can be sustained in a post-pandemic world remains to be seen. Many stakeholders are anticipating viewing behavior changing once again as the world collectively returns to normal in the months ahead. Still, Comscore has identified considerable opportunity for what it calls the non- “Big Five” services, with the next five top services having increased viewership by 17% versus about 8% for the top five during the early months of the pandemic. As an eventual reset looms, new, emerging and established players alike are plotting global strategies for future success. According to Digital TV Research, by 2025, the top five countries will command two-thirds of global OTT revenue, down from 72% in 2019. This will be driven by OTT growth in the rest of the world beginning to increase at a faster rate. OTT revenues are expected to exceed $1 billion in 19 countries by 2025, says the firm. So what does all this mean? It means scale matters. Moving quickly to capitalize on fleeting moments matters. Having a technical architecture that offers the freedom to partner or pivot quickly on a region-by-region basis matters. It is the ability to capitalize on these advantages that will determine which streaming companies vying for more share will find success in a forever-changing market. Let’s dive into some of the most prominent opportunities on the table today. www.evergent.com 06 Five Keys To Unlock Worldwide Video Subscription Growth There’s no way around it, the OTT market is Got Scale? moving quickly. The largest players have deep pockets, big teams and plans for continued global (You’re Gonna expansion. Chances are, wherever you show up, they’ll already be there, vying for the same Need It...) consumer dollars and attention. But really, scale isn’t about being a behemoth. It’s about being able to move and grow at a pace commensurate with market demands and your own ambitions. In short, being ready for what may not be known today. And the latest tech advancements are putting scale within reach for any size player, even at modest budgets. Linear growth was fairly easy to manage because it was steady. But OTT? It is not uncommon for services to enter a market and suddenly realize they have a top offering that is taking off faster than they expected. Or maybe they gain access to a hot piece of content that has a deluge of users piling into the service. The worst problem to have at that moment is a platform that can’t support the demand. “It“ is critically important to have a platform that lets you scale, deliver innovation and support a strategy around data capture that will let you make the best decisions on investments, features, content and more.” Paul Pastor, Firstlight Media There are a few critical areas where scale has become of the utmost importance; How payment options will be presented and which types accepted are often an afterthought when a service is being designed.