As streaming platforms compete for viewers’ attention, the teams behind these services are discovering that personalization is not just a feature – it’s a strategic imperative. However, teams are still reluctant to rely on personalization and recommendation solutions. This is because there is a lot of belief that AI and personalization cannot truly understand the behaviors and connections with content. One study found that 35% of participants think that AI will never truly understand them like humans do. The perfect balance to get the most out of your service is when you mix human editorial control with AI technology. We’re taking a look at how personalization solutions can actually empower editorial and product teams for OTT platforms rather than working against them.
Personalization is Imperative
Most TV consumers expect more than just a library of content. They demand experiences explicitly tailored to their preferences, viewing habits and individual tastes. This shift has transformed personalization from a nice-to-have feature to a critical competitive advantage. According to McKinsey, companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. Personalization solutions enable teams to create dynamic, adaptive experiences that engage viewers more. Not only can personalization increase engagement, but it can enable you to make data-driven decisions such as predictive viewing trends and content performance analytics, which can help decide what content is best for your platform and users, ensuring that your content budget is spent effectively.
Empowering Teams with the Right Tools
When finding a solution, it’s important to find the one that works best for your team and your goals. AI-powered personalization can not only tailor your user interface with recommendations but advertisements, notifications and upsell offers that meet the individual preferences and behaviors of viewers. By leveraging techniques like machine learning and data analytics, OTT platforms can analyze user data to deliver a more engaging and relevant experience.
Recommendation engines and personalization algorithms rely on user data to make predictions and tailor content presentation. Some people can be skeptical about working with such solutions. As they believe that these algorithms can sometimes exhibit bias, leading to inaccurate recommendations or creating filter bubbles that limit users’ exposure to diverse content. This is something that is highly misunderstood. Modern solutions are easy to customize to adapt to the use cases required to keep users entertained, make them return more often to your service and embrace content packages and upselling offers tailored to their needs.
The Perfect Balance Between Human Editorial Control and AI
Personalization solutions can provide valuable insights into watching behaviors, but it’s important to strike the right balance between human expertise and AI-driven automation. Your content and editorial teams know your platform best and want to ensure that your brand shines through your service. Our personalization solution gives the control that teams are looking for but still prioritizes the best user experiences for each viewer. By combining the creativity and intuition of editorial teams with the data-driven capabilities of AI, OTT platforms can create a holistic personalization strategy that resonates with viewers and drives business success.
Mixing automated personalization with the expertise of teams can be crucial to the success of certain campaigns or when promoting editorial picks. For example, with XroadMedia you can still decide the content that is shown, but the order it’s shown for each user can be more engaging for viewers. As well as ensuring your goals, this can reassure teams that they don’t have a complete lack of control but help build trust between providers and subscribers by showing you know and not just pushing editorial choices.
The challenge with a lot of recommendation engines and personalization tools is that they have fixed algorithms, lack flexibility and operate as a black box for service providers. But with the right solution, this does not need to be the case. A flexible solution allows for tailored experiences for individual users, but also creates effective campaigns utilizing smart cohorts. With XroadMedia’s tools, you can automatically segment your audiences into cohorts based on activity level, type of content they enjoy, location and more to deliver relevant content to them that they will enjoy. In addition, personalizing the UX for individual users or even their profiles further enhances the experience, resulting in higher engagement and return rates.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Personalization solutions can have the possibility to break down traditional silos, fostering collaboration between different catalogs and teams. Even if a service has its own personalization team, recommendation engines and personalization solutions are still vital tools that don’t take away value from what they bring to the platform. By creating a shared language of user insights, teams that were once disconnected can now work together more effectively than ever before. Content, product, data science teams can combine real-time insights to make improvements for both the user and the service provider’s business goals, creating a data-driven innovation within the organizations.
As technology evolves, the lines between departments will continue to blur. Successful OTT platforms will be those that can create the most seamless, integrated approach to understand and serve user needs. Personalization is no longer just a technological solution – it’s a strategic approach that empowers OTT teams to deliver exceptional user experiences. By embracing advanced personalization solutions, teams can transform viewer engagement, drive platform loyalty, and stay ahead in the competitive streaming landscape.
XroadMedia Fits into Your Team and Ecosystem
Introducing personalization solutions can disrupt established workflows and processes within teams. Some team members may be resistant to change or skeptical about the benefits of personalization, leading to hesitancy in adopting new technologies. The XroadMedia solution is a proven set of algorithms and use cases that can easily be integrated via one single API into various ecosystems. We work with you and your relevant teams to fully understand your goals so we can help drive results for your KPIs and your business.
As our solution is not a black box, you can choose the best way to apply and work with it. You can plan how you want personalization to influence your UI and other touchpoints users have with your service with intuitive back-end tools or which users to promote your retention offers to with our smart cohorts.
If you want to know more about how XroadMedia can power your teams, please get in touch.
