Content acquisition is probably the trickiest part of any streaming entrepreneur’s journey. It involves navigating through the complex dynamics of emerging content trends and analyzing the changing behavior of the audience. But now that you have the content in place, thanks to allrites, it's time for the next step - launching your own streaming platform.
You will have three ways to launch your streaming platform. Each of them has its own pros and cons. In this blog, we will help you understand the nitty-gritty of all these three processes. We will discuss the challenges they pose and how you can tackle them.
So, let's get started!
Three Ways to Launch a Streaming Platform
As stated before, you can build your own streaming platform in the three following ways:
DIY
You might be interested in building your platform from scratch on your own. Obviously, it gives you much more control and complete ownership of the process.
But you must also consider the downsides of it.
You will need to hire a team with deep technical expertise in video streaming technology and set up the entire IT infrastructure from scratch. The process will be complex and time-consuming. You must also take care of maintenance, updates, and security patches once you launch the platform. We are not even talking about the costs here.
At the end of the day, it will delay your time-to-market. Hence, you should consider this option ONLY if you have a well-established team with the necessary technical expertise and resources. Even then, you will face multiple challenges. We will discuss them in our upcoming sections.
3rd Party IT Service Providers and Freelancers
If you are not comfortable building it yourself, you can get help from 3rd party IT service providers. Or you can even hire freelancers who will build the streaming platform for you.
They will arrange everything if you are willing to spend a lot. But there are a few downsides to it as they will have complete control over your source code. Also, if you need any further customization, you will have to contact them again.
No-code SaaS Solutions
There are many no-code streaming platform builders like Muvi that help you create your own branded OTT platform within minutes without coding or any IT infrastructure. They offer everything built in. Also, it's customizable.
If you choose options 1 and 2, you will face multiple challenges. Let’s now take a look at some of those challenges.
Key Challenges in Launching a Streaming Platform
Building a streaming platform from scratch is never easy. It will take a lot of time and technical effort. Also, self-hosted platforms might not be scalable enough. You might also face security and piracy threats. Let’s take a look at some of the key challenges you might face in this process.
Streaming Platform Stability and Scalability
You must make sure that your OTT platform is stable enough to support streaming high-quality videos to a large number of viewers. Also, you would want your videos to cross millions of views, but for that, your streaming platform must be scalable enough.
Streaming Platform and Content Security
The threat of content piracy is increasing day by day. And to negate these threads, implementing DRM (Digital Rights Management) is extremely crucial. DRM as we all know is a set of technologies and policies that is used to protect the intellectual property of content creators and/or copyright holders from unauthorized distribution, modification, and piracy.
Even a single DRM might not be enough. We recommend implementing Multi-DRM encryption.
However, implementing DIY Multi-DRM on your platform will be extremely expensive and difficult as you would have to ensure compatibility across devices and platforms. Also using Multi-DRM often leads to a multi-fold increase in storage costs and server complexity.
Streaming Platform Launch Date
Whether you code your platform on your own, or take the help of 3rd party service providers, it is going to take a lot of time anyway. Sometimes even months. And more development time will directly mean higher development costs and delayed go-to-market.
Streaming Platform Monetization Options
With a more focused approach to spending, viewers nowadays prefer a variety of options to choose from when consuming video entertainment - subscriptions (SVOD , ad-supported streaming (AVOD), pay-per-view streaming (TVOD), etc. Hence, you might want to diversify your offering to cater to diverse needs and budgets to succeed in today’s market.
But building all these monetization infrastructures from scratch will take a lot of time and effort. Also, implementing ad-supported technology is not that easy as ad-tech is a whole new world on its own.
Solution to Overcome These Challenges: Ready-to-Launch SaaS Option
You can easily bypass all those challenges discussed above by choosing a good ready-to-launch no-code SaaS option. To make things even easier for you, allrites has partnered with Muvi, one of the best no-code OTT solutions providers in the market.
Using Muvi’s flagship product, Muvi One - the fastest deployable OTT platform builder, you can build your own branded streaming platform in just a few mouse clicks. It offers you all the must-have features out of the box.
Let's explore why you should choose Muvi One as your preferred streaming SaaS option.
Muvi One: Must-Have Features for Video Streaming Platforms
If you are trying to build a world-class streaming platform at par with Netflix, Amazon Prime Videos, and Disney+, you will need to integrate some must-have features. Some of these features are:
1. Multi-DRM
As explained before, Multi-DRM is extremely crucial to prevent the piracy of videos. DRM is basically an advanced encryption technology where the videos can be decoded only using the DRM License Key.
With Multi-DRM you are making your videos compatible with multiple DRM servers, including Apple FairPlay, Google Widevine, and Microsoft PlayReady so that your content is streamed securely across devices/platforms.
2. CDN
CDN or Content Delivery Network is the network of cloud servers distributed worldwide. It helps you deliver streaming content to remote areas without buffering. That's because the content is streamed by the server located nearest to your viewer.
CDN not only helps reduce latency and buffering but is also a savior in times of cyber-attacks. If the mother server crashes, the CDN servers will still be delivering the services.
3. Watermarking
Watermarking comes in three types - static, dynamic, and forensic. Static watermarks are the most common ones that remain fixed at a particular position on the screen.
Dynamic watermarks, as the name suggests, keep revolving across the screen. As they change their position in every frame, it becomes difficult for the hackers to cleanly remove them from the video.
And then come forensic watermarks that reveal secret information about the viewer. In case of piracy, these watermarks help identify the source of the leak.
4. Multiple Monetization Models
As discussed before, viewers nowadays want to experiment with the way they consume film and tv content and how they pay for it. They would love to watch a few ads if that can reduce the cost of their subscription.
Most of the leading streaming platforms including Netflix are now offering multiple monetization options, including the ad-supported hybrid ones. Hence, you must implement them too to stay in competition.
5. Easy-To-Use UI
UI is a crucial feature for any streaming platform. Ease of use helps in converting visitors to subscribers.
Now when we say “Easy-to-use-UI”, what does it actually mean? It means it should be user-friendly and easy to understand. It should load fast. And most importantly, content navigation, that is finding specific content on your platform should be super smooth and easy. And a recommendation engine would be an added advantage.
6. Visual Designer for Customization
Visual Designer helps customize your front end easily without doing code-level editing every time. It makes your front-end customizations easier and faster, with less manual effort. Also, even a non-technical person with good design sense can handle it easily.
Now, you get all these key features that we discussed above, and many many more, built-in with Muvi One. You get 1000+ industry-leading features that cover everything from user management to role-based access control, and from security to monetization.
How an allrites Partner, Muvi, Helps to Launch a Streaming Platform
Muvi’s flagship product Muvi One is the world’s most renowned no-code streaming SaaS platform. It enjoys very high ratings in G2 and has won multiple accolades in the past few years, including streaming media readers choice award and leader badge in G2.
And it's extremely easy to build your own streaming platform using Muvi One. You just need to follow these steps:
Sign up with Muvi One. Click here to get started.
Login to your Muvi One CMS dashboard.
Go to “Website” → “Templates”. Choose the design template that you like.
After choosing, click on “Customize”. You will enter the Visual Designer.
In the Visual Designer, you can customize the entire front end as per your needs. You can also add brand elements like logos and brand colors.
Once your front end is ready, go to the “Content Management” section of your Dashboard.
Now click on “Content Library” → “Add Content”.
Fill out the content form with all the details, upload your video, banner, and metadata, and click on save. Your content will be added.
Now go to the “Monetization” menu. There you will get the option to choose from various monetization models like subscription, ad insertion, and pay-per-view.
After setting the monetization plans, integrate your preferred payment gateway.
You are now ready to go live with your streaming platform!
Final Words
Launching your own streaming platform from scratch involves multiple challenges. To help our customers successfully tackle all those challenges, allrites has partnered with Muvi - the leading streaming SaaS solution provider in the world.
With the help of Muvi One, you can create and launch your own streaming platform in minutes. You will get a 14-day free trial if you sign up with Muvi One using this link. We hope it will make your streaming entrepreneurship journey a bit easier!
About Muvi
Muvi is a SaaS Platform to launch your own streaming service. Muvi is dedicated to providing high-quality streaming experiences for users around the world. Muvi with its multi-faceted products enables media content & owners to effortlessly monetize their video and audio content outside of traditional advertising channels. They accomplish this by providing a self-service white-label platform through which you can build your own Multi-Screen Video and Audio Streaming (Live & On-Demand) platform.
About allrites
Located in Singapore and operating globally, allrites is a premier marketplace for buying and selling film, TV, and sports rights. We provide a vast catalog of Film and TV content, from major studios to independent producers, available in any language and genre. Our innovative licensing models, including allrites Content-as-a-Service, offer flexible and efficient solutions for content monetization and acquisition, accommodating the evolving needs of content buyers and sellers worldwide.
Contact us to learn more about us and our revolutionary CaaS model.
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