Despite the trail of destruction left in its wake, has the ongoing pandemic created a “black swan” moment for online streaming services, albeit unintentionally?
To put it in a nutshell, yes, it has. Permit me to marshal the facts. According to Robeco’s Global Consumer Trends report, the global Media and Entertainment industry firmly believes that digitization of consumption is NOT just a flash-in-the-pan. Within this ambit, streaming services still remains atop the pecking order, much like before the pandemic. The market is then expected to stabilize and reach $169.4 billion in 2023 at CAGR of 14 per cent from 2021. Clearly a steep growth path, this!
This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. An unexpected aspect uncovered by this shift is the advent of never-heard (or less-heard) terminology. Which, interestingly, are shaping major trends in this space! Take, for example, cord cutting, which is the process of cancelling a cable or satellite subscription and getting TV shows and movies by other means. Most often, this involves switching to video streaming services. Or, how about cord-shaving, the practice of keeping one’s cable TV subscription, but cancelling all the costly channels, packages, and add-ons? And yes, the list ends here!
Now, closer to home, it is pertinent to examine another trend that has recently found itself in the public eye. I allude, of course, to Collective or Social Viewing. This entails, to put it simply, viewers at different locations (perhaps even around the world) chatting with one another, whilst watching the same movie or show in a synchronized manner. Here’s the nub, though, this isn’t a new phenomenon! According to media experts, a leading global online streaming service provider led the pack. The company’s danmu (on-screen comments) facility enabled users to interact with each other through comments on top of the screen simultaneously (agree, disagree, criticism or volunteering subtitle foreign content) with a high degree of real-time online interactions and grassroots participation. This method of real-time, interactive and collective viewing experience has merely intensified during the pandemic. Not suddenly emerged out of the horizon.
In fact, to describe it as having “intensified” is a bit of an understatement. This space has, very clearly, emerged as a new battleground for the bigwigs-and everyone else!
Adding Value to the Proposition: What Comviva Brings to the Table
At the risk of tooting my own horn, permit me to state that Comviva, too, are excited at the prospects this space has to offer.
Our contribution to this bludgeoning space is the Fiesta with Friends- Mooditt Party a digital service offering. With the very ambitious (yet optimistic) aim of ensuring customers remain “socially connected”, the feature offers a novel method of viewing exclusive video content. It’s quite simple, really, to access the same, all the host requires to do is create an event at a specific time and share the link to all the invitees. After all, isn’t the first step to hook (and retain) the customer’s interest?
But, that’s not all. Apart from a very simple, streamlined experience, this feature can be leveraged in a myriad of ways, such as…
All in all, I believe it is safe to say that this space is poised to witness a flurry of activity for quite some time to come. A word of caution, though, the line between creating an interesting business proposition and creating customer fatigue with too many offerings is a very fine one. Tread carefully!
