Are you thinking about being an OTT provider like YouTube and Roku? Find out what you need to know on starting your on OTT channel here with Go Florida SEO!
With how the pandemic is encouraging most people to stay inside, they have limited options on what they can do for leisure. This is why people spend up to 6 hours watching videos on the internet. This presents you with a unique opportunity to monetize your brand to cater to these audiences.
Starting an OTT channel is a great way to take advantage of the situation. Doing this can also help you make a great impression with these audiences. There are many things for you to gain if you do this right.
Read on to learn how you can start an OTT service. You’ll also learn why doing this is the best way to help your business succeed.
1. What is an OTT Channel and Why Create One?
Creating an OTT platform not only takes advantage of the situation today but it also helps you create a good bond with your audience. The main pull of OTT on today’s market is that it builds relationships between the host and the watchers. This is true regardless of your video media, be it live streams or VOD.
Creating a new platform for your business is a better way of getting an income. This is because you can monetize the platform in different ways. Some offer a more direct way of generating an income like subscription-based methods.
An OTT service also helps you distinguish your brand. You can do this by structuring your videos to set a certain tone. It can be family-oriented, professional, or informative.
The best benefit of creating an OTT platform is that your business can scale. Creating video content, monetizing it, and marketing it has infinite scaling potential. This is even better if you create a website for your business.
2. Choose the Right OVP for Your Content
Before you consider creating an OTT channel for your brand, you must first look for a suitable OVP to use. A good online video platform helps you keep your videos up on the internet with no issues. This should cover everything from VOD to live streaming platforms.
What’s great is that there are tons of platforms for you to choose from. If you’re focused on live streaming as opposed to creating VODs, then platforms like Twitch, DaCast, and Facebook are viable options.
If you prefer making videos to archive, then YouTube and Vimeo are great platforms. You can upload your videos to these and allow you to even use them as your primary platform for operations.
The only drawback to choosing an OVP is that you don’t have any right to your videos. The platforms often own everything from your uploads to your account. There’s a great way for you to circumvent this issue, though.
3. Create a Website to Store Your Video Content
If you don’t want to use an OVP for your services, you can always create a website for your business. This is a great way to ensure that you don’t have any legal conflict over the ownership of your videos in the future. This is popular in streaming platforms and on platforms like YouTube.
What’s great about creating a website is that you have tons of CMS to use. Content management systems help you create unique and personalized websites. These are often easy to use because of their simple interfaces.
If you want to create a website fast, use the most popular one, WordPress. The platform has great templates to use and they cover most of the basic designs of a website. They even have an excellent drag-and-drop feature to make websites faster and easier.
What’s great about WordPress is that it allows you to install tons of plugins. Doing so helps you personalize your website and make it unique. It also gives you tons of features that can be beneficial for your audience.
Another reason to create a website is so that platforms won’t reject you outright. Big platforms like Apple and Amazon need any OTT service to have a website. This is to help their SEO and ensure that the videos have a domain to fall back on, ensuring they don’t display broken video links.
4. Find a Suitable Web Host
If you’re planning on creating a website for your videos, then you want to get a web host. A web host allows you to put your website on the internet in the first place. Without a good web host, no one will be able to visit your website at all.
When choosing a website, keep in mind that there are some choices for hosting to go for. With videos being your main form of media, you will need lots of space for them. Keep this in mind when choosing a plan for your hosting.
Shared hosting is the cheapest option available. You share a server with other websites if you go for this plan. This can be a good option if you don’t have much to spare for your budget at first.
The only problem with shared hosting is that it has limited space since you share the server with others. This won’t be a problem, though, if your videos don’t take up much space.
A problem that you can’t fix yourself, though, is hacking. The main problem with shared servers is that there isn’t much security between the users.
Dedicated hosting and virtual private servers are the ideal options for your website. These ensure you don’t leak information to anyone else. This also ensures that you have enough space to save your data.
5. Define Your Market and Demographics
Knowing your market and audience is among the essentials of marketing for businesses. This is important for you to prevent yourself from getting lost in your original goal as a business. Many brands forget what their service is once they try to become an OTT platform.
A simple way to do this is by knowing the video content you will be releasing. Do you aim to entertain your audience with fictional content? Then become a movie and series OTT.
Want to inform your audiences about what’s happening around the world? Becoming an OTT news channel is a great way to do this. It’s easy to gain an audience this way since lots of people look for news outlets to watch.
Knowing what your demographic looks for in an OTT service also helps you mold your content. It will help you make the correct videos to appeal to them. You can do some research to know what appeals to your audience before creating your content.
6. Acquire Licenses
If you want your business to survive, licensing is the way to do it. This is important if you want to follow the business model of Netflix or Hulu. Without licensing, your business will be prone to lawsuits and copyright strikes.
You will need to have great negotiation tactics to get the licensing you need. This makes business models like Netflix not recommended for those who don’t know how to negotiate. Without great negotiating tactics, you won’t get anything to set your brand apart from the others.
When doing this, focus on the licenses of the shows your audience will like. Use the information you gathered from before to gather shows to add to your catalog.
7. Market Your Content
Given the state of OTT advertising nowadays, it’s will be easy for you to market your content. You shouldn’t have any problem when it comes to gathering a following behind your brand. In case you don’t know what to do, though, here’s how you can market your content.
Social media marketing is a good way to get a lot of people to notice your brand. This is because there are tons of people on social media platforms at any given time. Posting content on these platforms is a great way to get their attention.
8. Invest in Security Features
Now that you have content to market, you now need to protect them. This makes it important to invest in security features to prevent different kinds of theft. This is a big deal since people will steal content if they’re able to.
Copyrighting your video content is a great way to prevent people from stealing your content. While they can still download it, they can’t claim it as their own. Doing this also prevents future lawsuits claiming your videos as their own.
Encrypting your video is another way to protect your videos. This disallows anyone who isn’t subscribed to your service unable to access your videos. It’s a great way to convince people to subscribe to your services.
9. Optimize Your Videos for SEO
Optimizing your videos for SEO is important to have them searchable. This works both on search engines and on platforms like YouTube who have their unique search engine properties. You can hire an SEO agency, or do these to do it on your own.
Use Keywords to Target Audiences
Keywords are the heart and soul of SEO. These will help you steer your content towards your audience through searches. It’s a great way to ensure your content doesn’t go to waste and will help you generate an income.
It all starts with bidding on keywords. You can choose long-tail keywords or short-tail ones from the list of keywords. Make sure you get one that’s relevant to your content to increase its effectiveness.
Short-tail keywords are more generalized but are easier to use for large audiences. Long-tail keywords are often harder to use in a descriptive sentence. They’re also more specific, making them better for niche clients.
Optimize For Mobile Devices
Ensuring that your content is mobile-compatible is important for success. This is because over 96% of the population owns a smartphone. They often access the internet through their mobile devices, too.
Optimizing your content for mobile devices saves you from having a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is the frequency of people who leave your platform as soon as they enter. A high bounce rate will lower your SEO score.
Use common resolutions for modern smartphones to optimize your content. Doing this uses your audience’s entire screen. They won’t feel weirded out by having a resolution that doesn’t fit their screen this way.
Enable Sharing of Your Videos
Sharing your videos makes it easier more of your demographic to find your content. Doing this also increases your SEO score because it circulates your content around the internet. Search engine bots will determine this as a hot piece of media and push others to see it, too.
You can add a share button to your content to do this. You can also perform video marketing to increase the organic search rate of your content.
10. Choose a Monetization Method
Now, all that’s left for you to do is to monetize your videos. Forgetting to do this is among the worst mistakes you can do as a startup business or such. What’s great is that there are 2 ways for you to monetize your video content with ease.
One method is by presenting your audience with a subscription service. This ensures that you get an income as soon as people start knowing about your service. You need to make the subscription worth their while, though.
A good way to do this is by giving them access to your catalog if they subscribe. Don’t hide content and make sure that everyone gets the same content.
Advertisement monetization is another method of generating income. This is a good choice if you think your audience can’t afford subscriptions. All they need to do is watch the ads in their entirety to generate an income.
Create An OTT Channel Today
There’s no better way to ensure your brand’s success than by creating an OTT channel. Engage your audience and entertain them with your unique video media today!
Do you want to learn more about how you can monetize your videos? You may want to look at YouTube for different means of marketing your products and services. Here’s how you can succeed with YouTube marketing on your first try.
