The OTT Business Case: How To Grow Your Business And Organization By Utilizing Mobile, Web & TV Apps the Right Way

May 5, 2023

Viewer Engagement

Similar to your company’s website, your mobile apps, web apps and TV apps are a place for your followers to find your contents, learn more about you, your services, your message, your offerings, and where they can connect with you, and feel connected (no matter which follower-type you seek to connect with such as customers, leads/prospects, viewers, donors, supporters, hires).

Lightcast offers integrated engagement ROI tools, such as free account registration or email capture, built into your web apps, mobile apps and TV apps. This allows you as a media publisher to not only reach out to followers and viewers by speaking to them, but also to connect with them by receiving at least their email address for you to follow up with, to nurture and engage with your viewers continuously. This is where OTT exceeds the capabilities of traditional Radio and TV broadcast.

Branding

Most business and organizations don’t have a choice anymore. Just like a website is a “must have”, mobile apps and TV apps are becoming “must have” business extensions and branding sites your brand simply needs in order to establish and own your brand name across all major app stores, which are increasingly becoming important search engines of their own.

It may not be a matter of “can we afford to have our own branded apps in all app stores?” but rather “can we afford not to?”. Your brand, services and contents may simply need the visibility and accessibility across the primary app stores, just like your brand, services and contents need a website which can be found via search engines.

Viewer Service

If you are already publishing live-streams or on-demand contents on social media, your brand would benefit from an enhanced viewer experience. By providing your viewers your own branded mobile apps, web apps and TV apps for their favorite devices and TVs, you are branding yourself as "customer-friendly” as you are adding additional value to your contents.

After all, you are producing or acquiring media contents for your viewers, with your viewers in mind. By allowing them to download your brand’s apps onto their mobile devices, Smart TVs and streaming players throughout their household, shows how much you care, a fact which will be appreciated by your viewers and followers.

Monetization

If you already have a growing following on social media, such as a popular YouTube Channel or Facebook Page, you would benefit from diversification of your revenue streams, by building additional revenue streams through your own web apps, mobile apps and TV apps (aka “OTT”) across all major devices, screens and app stores. You can choose from multiple turnkey monetization tools such as subscription sales, PPV (Pay-Per-View) ticket sales, your own sponsors, ad-network integration, serving both your own ads and ads from third-party providers such as ad networks.

Your own mobile apps, web apps and TV apps allow you to monetize according to your own preferences, decisions, changes and strategies. You are not subject to someone else’s advertising rights and you control the terms, frequency, relationships, contracts directly. You are the operator and publisher of your apps and you are in complete control over your contents, your publications, your monetization strategies, advertisers and subscribers. That is why your organization, your brand, should establish your custom-branded mobile apps, web apps and TV apps across all major app-stores, devices and screens as soon as possible.

Here are some of the many successful OTT use-cases we have seen among our customers:

App Type: Public TV Apps with optional access control or email capture/registration feature

Use Case "Customer Support": to keep customers happy, educated and engaged: Libraries of Video FAQs, Video Tutorials, Video Handbooks
Use Case "Marketing & Sales Support": To promote more sales of your products and services: Libraries of Product Reviews, Customer Testimonials, Product Demos

App Type: Access-Controlled or Non-Public TV Apps

Use Case "Internal Training & HR": to automate and simplify training and engagement of new hires and existing employees or affiliates: Video Employee Tutorials, Training Video Libraries & Courses, Onboarding Videos, Internal Management Communication
Use Case "Education": Distance Learning Programs, Classroom Video Libraries, Project Video Libraries

Apps with Direct Viewer Monetization

Subscription Sales: offer access to all, or selections of, your on-demand libraries and/or live-streams
Flexscriptions: offer access to selections of your contents in exchange to a flexible (donation-like) amount your viewers can choose (while you can set a minimum amount).
PPV Ticket Sales: for live-stream events
Sponsors: pre/mid/post-roll the ads of your sponsors around all, or selections of, your contents
Ad Networks: integrate ad-feeds from ad networks to pre/mid/post-roll their ads across all, or selections of, your contents

What OTT is Not:

A competition to social media. In fact, OTT is actually complementary to social media. They both have to work hand in hand. In reality, you need both: social media visibility and your custom-branded mobile apps, web apps and TV apps, tightly linked with your website(s).

Your OTT presence, your custom-branded mobile apps, web apps and TV apps across all major devices, screens and app-stores, are your “business tools”, not your “marketing tools”. They are multi-media extensions of your websites and while social media can be compared to the nets you need to capture large schools of fish, your mobile apps, web apps and TV apps are the boat into which you want to pull the fish. One doesn’t work without the other: without nets you won’t catch anything and without a boat you won’t keep anything.

Please let us know if you would like to explore any of the above mentioned services and features by scheduling a callback at schedule.lightcast.com. We would love to help you find the right tools for your apps to grow your online viewership and maximize your ROI!

Your Lightcast Consulting Team