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STEVE RUSSELL: The majority of our customers are in the business of entertainment. They’re sports organisations, broadcasters or within the media space. And, of course, video has always been a key medium for entertaining people. If we’re talking about direct-to-consumer OTT propositions, there is an opportunity to build a direct relationship with your audience. Typically, existing media companies want a way of augmenting their business model. They’re used to doing rights deals and being aggregated by larger companies, but now they’ve got the ability to go direct-to-consumer – that has certain advantages. Usually, the aim is to monetise that proposition through advertising or subscription revenues. We’ve worked with major brands doing one-off streaming events that have had a million viewers. And we deal with traditional broadcasters launching a global VOD service, monetising that through advertising. Other times, we’ve worked with wine companies or people putting on boxing matches, just enabling them to get content to users.
NEAL ROMANEK: How can I get started?
STEVE RUSSELL: Apply some principles of product management to your offering. First, how do I make it unique and compelling? But be careful not to overcomplicate everything from day one. An advantage now is that, in order to get a service to market, the bar is far lower. It’s easier than ever to launch a service, and you can take advantage of that. Consider your minimum viable product, your MVP. What’s the MVP that you can get out? Rather than trying to think about everything, get that minimum out to the market early. Then, it’s all about listening, adapting and evolving. You might actually find it’s a dumb idea and nobody watches, so you cut your losses and move on to something else. More interestingly, look at the data and start talking to the people who use your platform about what they like and what they think is missing. You may start adding features, or find the platform is perfectly fine, but you need to fill it with more content – or you could do a better job of driving people towards it. I’d encourage people not to worry about getting everything right first time, specifying an enormously complicated concept that never gets to market. Flip that totally, and try to get a service out there, remaining sensitive to the way it has been received.
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