In the age of disruptions, industries have been embracing the digital force to deliver value to their consumers, and the entertainment industry is no different. With COVID restrictions in place, the entertainment industry evolved to meet customer needs during the pandemic, and before we even knew it, the way we consume content completely changed. Forever. Digital transformation in the entertainment industry has always been relatively slower than others. But as Digital became a major platform for content creation and distribution, and as the audience became more comfortable with the medium, it opened up countless opportunities for the players in the media sphere but it also meant that they have to undergo years of digital transformation in a short span of time. The future of the entertainment industry after covid-19 is now digital!
It is not a stretch to say that OTTs were a part of our “dealing with the COVID” strategy! While OTT platforms helped the engines of the industry to keep running, they also significantly increased the average content consumption of the audience. Thanks to OTT platforms, instant entertainment has become the industry standard now. As the audience started to consume content at an exponential rate, the demand for content creators rose, and many OTT platforms leveraged this opportunity to meet the demand for content.
Popular platforms like YouTube which has more than 2 billion users under its wings, have been aligning their operations and user experience to encourage content creators to create various short-form and long-form content and made the whole content consumption experience simple for the users. Now, YouTube has entered the streaming market to further penetrate the media market. And being a technology company at its core, platforms like YouTube have to rethink their digital infrastructure to support this seamless creation and transaction of content in the platform.
Enter Amazon Kinesis. Kinesis is a part of Amazon Web Services that helps a business collect, process, and analyze huge volumes of data streams in real-time, effortlessly. The audience’s favorite OTT platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Fox, and many others are built with Kinesis. To leverage the drastic surge in the creation and distribution of content, media companies have to identify the flow of direction of the content, and Kinesis delivers exactly that(among many others) to the businesses. It helps them extract actionable and real-time insights from the ocean of data, and as a cutting-edge platform, it helps OTT platforms to scale faster. Moving forward kinesis is an integral part of building a scalable OTT platform
Many media companies are repositioning themselves to take this leap towards Kinesis, and this will have a huge impact on our content consumption chain. With powerful tools for content creation, particularly video creation, being normalized, the number of content creators will only increase in the future. Digital influencers are one example of how our content consumption patterns have changed with the digital. With technologies like 5G entering the market, the audience will expect an intensely smoother content uploading and consumption. Platforms that understand this are reinforcing their existing digital infrastructure to deliver on this expectation. Versatility is also an undeniable factor in the quick rise of OTT. With consumers shifting to new operating systems, and the IoT wave bringing in an extensive range of devices to the market, OTT platforms should focus on delivering a holistic end-user experience despite the type of device the content is played on.
For instance, one of the leading players in the entertainment industry- Netflix, is using Amazon Kinesis to monitor the communications between all of its applications so that it can identify any bugs or issue instantly, allowing Netflix to fix them quickly. Live events, too, are changing to cater to a wide audience. Live music events have taken a hit during the pandemic, but as the world is now closer to 100% recovery, live events have huge demand. Sporting events have cult followers across the globe, and live sporting events attract a massive audience to the OTT platform. Millions of people stream the same event at the same time in various formats, and devices, and with different networks. In such scenarios, digital technologies like Kinesis are enabling businesses to take a simplified approach to their operations.
Our industry experts at W2S Solutions strongly believe that the pressure of entering the Metaverse on media companies is intense, and this will, in fact, bring a huge shift in the way we experience entertainment. And leveraging technologies like Kinesis is how your entertainment business can get ready for this bigger future. This transition from viewing to experience may look like a huge step, but reports suggest that Virtual Reality and Metaverse will be an integral part of our lives, quicker than we think.
Join us in our webinar
We are organizing a webinar for the leaders of the entertainment and media industry on the impact of Kinesis on OTT platforms, and what happens inside one. Our chief technical architect will lead the webinar and will interact with the participants to help them leverage digital and deliver unparalleled value to their audience. We will discuss a variety of topics in the media and entertainment industries, including the trends, challenges, and how companies can fetch ROI without compromising on their vision.
You can register for the webinar here – Building next-generation streaming services with Amazon Kinesis
