Plugging Revenue Leaks in PayTV

How Operators Can Win Back Profits with Better User Experiences

The PayTV industry is at a crossroads. With competition from direct-to-consumer platforms and shifting viewer expectations, operators are grappling with profitability challenges and diminishing customer lifetime value. Yet, the root cause often lies in broken user experiences along the end-to-end journey. From content discovery to billing and streaming, gaps in the user experience lead to churn, revenue leakage, and missed growth opportunities.

The Challenge: Content Brings Users, But Experience Retains Them

As highlighted during an IBC 2024 panel session featuring leaders from Evergent, MediaKind, ThinkAnalytics, and Bitmovin, while the content might attract viewers to a platform, it’s the experience that’ll keep ‘em there. Check out this example of what just such a fantastic user experience can produce. When platforms fail to provide a seamless, engaging, and intuitive journey, users quickly abandon ship.

Broken user experiences can manifest as:

• Frustrating Content Discovery: Users give up when they can't find appealing content quickly, contributing to churn.
• Technical Hiccups: Poor streaming quality, buffering, or device incompatibility alienates viewers.
• Inflexible Pricing Models: Operators often miss opportunities to engage users with dynamic pricing, promotions, or packages tailored to individual preferences.
• Prolonged Time-to-Market: Launching new features or addressing user feedback takes too long, leaving operators lagging behind nimbler competitors.

The Opportunity: Strategic Partnerships and Tech Solutions

This panel, featuring decades of industry experience, often collaboratively, underscored how strategic partnerships and pre-integrated solutions can transform PayTV operations, improving both user retention and profitability. Productive strategic partnerships can often produce amazing achievements.

Here’s what operators can do to plug revenue leaks:

1. Embrace Personalization and Predictive Analytics Leveraging platforms like ThinkAnalytics allow operators to build individualized profiles for millions of users. By understanding preferences at a granular level—genres, moods, and themes—operators can recommend diverse content to prevent churn and increase viewing hours.
2. Adopt Pre-Integrated Solutions for Agility With pre-integrated platforms offered by partners like MediaKind and Bitmovin, operators can reduce the time to market for new features from months to days. This agility helps platforms respond to user feedback, market trends, and competitive pressures with unprecedented speed.
3. Deliver Flawless Streaming Across Devices Bitmovin’s video player ensures high-resolution, uninterrupted streaming on any device, from gaming consoles to mobile phones. Coupled with advanced analytics, operators gain insights into user experiences, enabling proactive issue resolution and personalized outreach.
4. Experiment with Dynamic Revenue Models As Vijay Sajja, CEO of Evergent, noted during the session, flexibility in pricing and packaging is critical. Sometimes even the most popular platforms can shoot growth up through the stratosphere through a few tweaks in the end-to-end experience for those curious users who found the service in the first place. Operators can tap into tools that enable real-time adjustments based on market feedback, maximizing revenue while offering tailored value to users.
5. Enable Data-Driven Proactivity Proactive engagement is the future of user retention. By integrating purchase history, viewing analytics, and service performance, operators can predict churn, personalize promotions, and delight customers with timely interventions.

Case in Point: Accelerating Deployments and Scale

One example from the IBC panel showcased the deployment of a PayTV solution in just four months across six geographies—a process that historically took years. This rapid scalability, powered by strategic partnerships like MediaKind, ThinkAnalytics, and Evergent, allows operators to cater to millions of users while optimizing profitability.

Watch the full IBC 2024 session, “Innovation by Strategic Partnership in the PayTV Domain,” featuring Evergent CEO & Founder Vijay Sajja, MediaKind’s President of Operator Platforms, Ashish Patel, Igor Oreper, Chief Architect & CSO at Bitmovin and Peter Docherty, Founder & CTO of ThinkAnalytics.

Winning Back Revenue

To thrive in the evolving media landscape, PayTV operators must focus on creating frictionless, value-driven user experiences. Strategic partnerships and robust technology solutions are the foundation for this transformation. By addressing broken experiences and empowering operators with flexibility and scalability, the industry can unlock new revenue streams and reclaim its position as a viewer favorite.

Let’s stop the leaks and start building experiences worth paying for. Set up some time with our team of experts to learn how the subscription management and monetization solutions of Evergent can help.