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While proprietary platforms offer brand control, third-party partnerships provide access to existing user bases. Telecom collaborations minimize acquisition costs but may challenge brand recognition. Social media offers broad distribution but poses challenges in content discovery and brand dilution.
Establishing a proprietary platform offers brand ownership and IP rights retention, but entails high customer acquisition costs. Third-party partnerships provide access to existing user bases, yet lack brand equity creation and user loyalty. Telecom collaborations minimize traffic acquisition costs but may challenge brand recognition amidst competing content. Leveraging social media enables broad distribution, but content discovery and brand dilution are concerns amidst platform competition.
The main reason for creating your own platform is to have your own brand and retain IP rights. Usually, own platforms are best suited for a Freemium monetisation model. Platform owners have to contend with high customer/traffic acquisition costs and limited opportunities around content syndication with rival paltforms
Hosting content or syndication deals with third party OTT platforms provides content producers avenues to reach a ready user base with no investments in infrastructure. The revenue models in such cases are usually on the lines of minimum guarantee or fixed fee basis. However, such partnerships do not result in any brand equity creation, nor user loyalty pertaining to a particular channel. Further, revenues in such models would be strictly dependent on the success of the content, which is a bit of an unknown.
After a rapid data uptake, content has become extremely important for telecom service providers to engage with and retain their customer base. Some of the OTT platforms are trying to build their content library through partnerships with other VOD platforms and content producers. Partnerships like these allow platforms and creators to access 400+ million wireless internet user base with minimal costs to acquire traffic organically. While the content discoverability on a teleco platform could be better than YouTube, a plethora of competing content would make brand recognition and user stickiness difficult in the long run.
Platforms like YouTube and Facebook have created a very big impact on our Indian consumers. Hosting content on YouTube has been one of the simplest and effective distribution models, especially for pure play content players with limited resources to create an own platform. Facebook’s video platform has grasped the attention of many producers distributing their content through Facebook pages as these platforms provide access to a large audience. However, this distribution model poses major challenges around content discovery and brand dilution, as these platforms have a large library of similar, competing channels, with the possibility of declining CPMs as bargaining power of platforms grows.
