How Niche OTT Services Reduce Churn
Learn more about the OTT market at Streaming Media's next event.
Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, OTT201. How Niche Video Services Can Find Success, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Jonathan Barbato: From a customer retention standpoint, or getting them to come back again and again, what are you guys up to?
Jon Cody: Look, for us it's a very, it's a relatively simple formula. Feed you what you love. Right? So I mean we kinda, you know, we think that perfect purpose is the one in which I'm touching your personal passion, whatever it is. Whether it is autos, or cancer, or, you know, whatever it is that, you know, that is one of your three personal loves in life. And what you find, home and gardens, you know, food, people come and they, you know, they will come back, just by the nature that you've touched their, like, you know, personal passion. And they get very connected to these services, to the point where, you know, they're, if you don't keep feeding them, they get disappointed.
So I think that, to us, is kinda the formula, which is, make sure that every time you come to one of these things, you're personally connected to it. And you wanna keep coming back to such a thing. We just think the general entertainment space, while it's great to have one, if you can figure it out, is very, very difficult. Not only are there a lot of people in it, but the content's expensive, the marketing's expensive, wherein, you know, as you get kinda into these smaller communities, you know, now it, content's available and relatively inexpensive.
The audience can be acquired for a relatively cheap rate. They stick around for a long time, so they're lifetime values, whether on AVOD or SVOD, make financial sense. And then a bunch of them will become brand ambassadors and go out and do the marketing for you.
Jonathan Barbato: Nice. Erick, did you want to add something?
Erick Opeka: Yeah, so I think one thing that we've realized in operating our portfolio of niche services is the audience isn't making a conscious decision saying, "Hey, I wanna subscribe to a video service of my passion, and then I wanna subscribe to an audio service." They're just like, "Super-serve me in the vertical that," you know, well they're not saying vertical obviously because they're consumers. But they're saying, "Hey, give me a bunch of stuff that I love that's in the topic I love."
So if you love cooking, the new Food Network service, where you've got audio cooking lessons, you've got the video, there's interactivity, there's live cooking classes. That's it, that's a really innovative way to go about it. We, for CONtv, which is our fandom brand, we acquired two companies to sorta do that. One was a company called Viewster, which brought us, you know, over 5,000 hours of anime, which really deepened us in a segment that our fans wanted more of. And then we acquired a comic subscription service called Comicblitz, which we integrated in.
So now when somebody subscribes, basically for the same price, they're not only getting 3,000 hours of fandom content, but they're getting 12,000 issues of all the major comic books. They're getting 5,000 hours of anime now. And then on top of that, a big, as you've probably seen, there's a lot of news today about Spotify, and them going exclusive on the audio side. We're finding audio is an incredibly sticky piece, and a good component, a companion, to video.
So we've started basically curating and aggregating at least the publicly available podcasts into the direct-to-consumer app, so people, if they're driving and they wanna experience something, they can. They have another choice. But I think that idea of super-serving a vertical is really how you, you stand out from competitors and also differentiate yourself against broad-based, general entertainment.
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