With global revenues steadily growing and reaching USD 30 billion, the OTT VOD market is nothing but a reasonable investment. Consumer behavior, demand for choice, and evolving interactions are transforming the industry. The dynamic nature of OTT makes this industry unlike traditional broadcast, and hence, far from the point of saturation. Any platform with the right value proposition and a backend designed for extensibility can indeed achieve success.

Companies aiming for a long-term OTT strategy face a quandary of whether to build their platform from scratch themselves or to leverage expert partners with a proven technology stack. Both pathways have their issues and benefits. Building an in-house platform from scratch might seem like a sensible choice, but getting stuck in the process due to high costs and long development cycles, or ending up with a monolithic non-scalable platform is not uncommon. So, unless a company has enough resources to spare and plenty of experience in the OTT industry, seeking expert-built customizable solutions as a base seems more objective.

Establishing an OTT infrastructure can be challenging; the multi-staged process needs to be designed with utmost consideration for workflows and maximum automation. From ingestion and management to security and distribution, each step needs to be considered carefully. Companies not only want to give the best QoS and QoE to the viewers, but they also want streamlined workflows for the stakeholders behind the scenes.

Let's have a look at the different processes, their function, and what’s expected from a platform:

A collaborative approach towards the platform solves most of the challenges faced by companies; it combines the ambitions and requirements of the platform with a proven technology stack from an experienced vendor. The stack, oriented for future growth, should allow for customizations and in-house operation and development take-over.

Benefits of an expert leveraged approach:

1. Expertise and modularity

In-house creation can yield good results only if there is a vision that is backed by domain expertise. In-house development endeavors require vast experience in carrying out such software development projects of scale.

Companies building their own platform usually find themselves with a tightly-coupled monolithic architecture, which is highly dependent on other components and is non-scalable. An industry expert on the contrary understands the need for a modular architecture that allows for high scalability and easy maintenance, where faulty services can be easily isolated, debugged, and deployed in a fraction of time.

Furthermore, a collaborative approach enables easy transfer of technical skills and an easy in-house takeover, by the time the platform matures.

2. Faster time to market

Contrary to the long development cycles of an in-house OTT platform, an expert built platform can be launched in a fraction of time, subject to the level of complexity, customization, and integrations involved.

Platform builds leveraging a modern approach allows for intelligent and automated workflows for ingestion, management, security, and distribution; paired with orchestration of the content and workflows depending on predefined conditions for business models, formats, geography, devices, and more, this reduces the time-to-market for the platform and the content immensely.

3. Pre-integrations

A crucial factor for an OTT head-end is the integrations, with own or third-party systems, and the availability of standard APIs for future integrations. Usually, systems built in-house are limited in their integration capabilities, leading to inefficient workarounds.

Partners with extensive experience in the industry are well aware and proficient in carrying out the needed integrations with own or third-party systems.

Axinom, a provider of best-of-breed solutions for OTT content management and protection, is well-versed in building OTT backends.

"Axinom proved to understand our strategic goals and our vision establishing a distinct positioning on the cluttered market, which was important in the process of selecting a reliable partner."
Amit Goenka
CEO - International Business ZEEL

Zee5 serves millions of users globally using Axinom CMS, which manages thousands of hours of international and regional content, linear channels, many languages, over 100 regions, multiple payment providers, and several integrations.

"Axinom CMS is one of the most flexible and modular end-to-end OTT management platforms we've see on the market. Their system will empower us to automate and simplify our content management workflows while improving scalability and robustness of our OTT platform."
Tony Huidor
VP - Products & Digital Operations Cinedigm

With a future-proof content management system, the providers can manage the digital assets, associated metadata, integrations, and much more. The system has the potential to be extended in-house to grow with the growing business, and operational requirements, ample aids such as developer training, support, and documentation are provided by Axinom to help such a scenario.