Making an app sounds daunting. There’s a lot that goes into making your content accessible, including the actual content creation and distribution, so the last thing you want to worry about is the technical side of your endpoints, and how user friendly they are.

Luckily with Zype, you don’t have to be a developer to create sleek apps. One of our strongest features is the accessibility and simplicity of our app templates, which lets you create and customize the user interface of your app in just a couple of clicks, resulting in a beautiful endpoint that features your branding front and center.

When you decide to take the next step with your content, the Zype dashboard makes it easy to move forward and create an app on your own.

First, you need to choose a platform. With Zype, you have the option to distribute to practically all endpoints, including OTT, mobile, web and gaming platforms.

Here comes the fun part: Once you have decided on where your content should live, you get to customize your app. For the sake of this blog post, we have chosen to create an AFTV app. The user can choose a featured playlist, categories to fill in content, color themes, logo or even full width header imagery and the option to customize background/text colors.

And voila, you’re ready to preview and publish! Roku, AFTV and Apple TV are the quickest templates to create, but SDK, plugin and API only platforms don’t have many more steps.

Our app templates are there to make your life easier, so not only does it give you a pre-made user interface for your app, but it also gives you room to customize your channel and promote your brand.

Depending on which platform(s) you choose (the more, the better!), Zype’s app templates will reflect the common user interface elements for that specific platform. Your app on Roku will look different than your channel on Apple TV because the two platforms have completely different brand integrations and tones. However, your Apple TV channel will have some commonalities with all other Apple TV channels.

For example, the Kin Community channel on Apple TV above looks very different from Kin Community on Roku below it, save for the color palette and branding. The platforms also differ on where they feature content: Apple has sliders linking to playlists, while AFTV has sliders linking to specific video content.

However, this doesn’t mean your channel will blend in with all of the others. Our app templates still allow for content owner flexibility, branding and that special touch that will make your app unique.

Now, the next time you want to add another distribution endpoint, the whole process will seem a little less scary, and a lot simpler.

Your App, Your Branding: Zype’s App Templates Let You Take Control With Ease

If you’ve just started exploring or are looking to scale using an OTT provider or other options to manage, distribute, and monetize your video content, you have come to the right place. Whether you’re looking into building Roku, Amazon FireTV, or other digital video apps, we’ve put together a checklist of top OTT video streaming features you will need from viewer registration to in-app subscriptions & payment processing.

Let’s take a look at 9 different features you’ll need to launch and optimize your video streaming application successfully.

 Compelling Content that’s Created and Well Organized for Your Target Audience 

It should be a no-brainer that you’ll need compelling content to draw your audience in. But if your content isn’t made or gathered with your target audience in mind, you’ll likely lose out in retaining those viewers. So before you even begin to think about monetizing your videos, you should have a content plan in place that sets the types of content you will produce, who you’ll produce it for, and at what frequency.

If you’re purchasing content rights from others, make sure you understand what your target audience will really want to watch.

With a content plan pulled together and several videos ready to go or in the queue, you’ll then have to think about how to best organize your content to keep those viewers coming back. You should consider looking into how to make the organization process easy on the back-end and flawless from the user’s perspective, which leads us to our next feature.

 Easy-to-understand Navigation and User Experience 

Would your viewers know how to easily get to your next video in your current set up or would they likely get lost? Do they know how to update their payments and, yes, even cancel their accounts?

Navigating through your video streaming application should be easy for the user. The ability to select video favorites comes in handy, where a viewer can mark which videos they care about, so they can return to them later. Not only is the goal to organize content, but to also make it easy for your users to continue to engage with your content even if they forget where they left off or switch devices. Another user experience to think about is making playlists that easily suggest next videos to watch like Netflix’s new random episode selection.

Similarly, the overall look and feel of your video streaming application has to provide a positive user experience. In today’s digital world, users have certain expectations on how features and technology should look and work. Investing in user experience always pays off in the long run.

 Eye-catching Image Assets — Video and Playlist Thumbnails 

To keep your viewers engaged and exploring more of your content, your supporting visual assets have to be as close to perfect as possible. This means making sure you have eye-catching images for your video and playlist thumbnails. According to TubularInsights, a few best practices for making thumbnails pop include:

These tips should help convert one-time users to subscribers, which is the next feature we want to highlight.

 Account Registration Workflows Across Devices 

One of the best ways to implement frictionless account registration workflows is to have them integrated with a single backend for high-quality universal authentication experiences. Allowing users to easily create a single email/password based login that enables access across devices is key. .

The benefits of universal authentication are that it allows users to consume your content on their terms using the same login info when they want to watch something on a different device.

 Low Friction Purchasing on Native Marketplaces 

Easy to use in-app payment workflows that are integrated with native marketplaces enable low friction purchasing. Navigating payment options across different endpoints and platforms is complicated, so you should really look into finding easier ways to accept payments from your customers across a wide range of devices and marketplaces.

All the user needs to worry about is being able to purchase your video content whether they find it on Roku, their mobile browser, Google Play or wherever else. On the backend, some solutions allow you to implement native billing that’s supported in template SDKs for marketplaces like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV. Once users purchase your content and are ready to watch, you should make it easy for them to access their purchased content.

Content lockers or video libraries are a great way to provide your users with easy access to video purchases & rentals. They also help users understand how to prioritize which content to access first by providing them with data such as viewed’ history, videos to watch later, favorites, likes, shares and expiring content.

 Seamless Video Playback for VOD and Live Streaming 

Your users expect to get high-quality video content and you have to make sure you have everything in place to provide that experience no matter what device they use, where they are, or what internet connection they have. One way to do that is to have seamless video playback for VOD and live. This should include adaptive bitrate playback technology to match any playback and bandwidth scenario.

How do you know if all the work you’re putting into videos is working? Are there fluctuations in engagement based on the type of device your content is consumed on?

More importantly, how can you tell what type of content truly resonates with your audience? Robust video engagement and device level analytics can help you identify positive trends and opportunities for improvement. You should be able to get a quick snapshot of your top performing video content so that you can keep a pulse on what’s driving the most views and purchases and optimize your funnels towards those actions and channels.

This is a critical top OTT video streaming feature for longterm video success.

Video ads are another way to monetize your video content, but you’ll need to manage running them at appropriate times and making sure they are targeted to your individual viewers.

One final top OTT video streaming feature you’ll need to launch successfully is to have control over your video advertising. This includes integrated ad playback support as well as the ability to pass dynamic values to ad servers to optimize ad fill. You can make the most out of your ads by utilizing ad macros to maximize CPMs and revenue by dynamically returning critical details to your ad SSPs.

 Ready To Implement These Top OTT Video Streaming Features? 

A final word of advice is to find tools that help you own and accelerate all aspects of your video management and distribution pipeline. Managing your video business should be done from a single dashboard. If you’re ready to jump into building your own video streaming web applications, feel free to reach out the Zype team to help you get started.

The Top OTT Video Streaming Features to Optimize

We’re excited to introduce customers to the Zype Professional Services team (ZPS for short)! The ZPS team is comprised of in-house developers, software & solutions architects, product managers, project and program managers, and broadcast engineers that provide world-class support across a broad spectrum of outcomes.

With ZPS, customers get high quality paid engagements to help Go To Market faster and more predictably than they can achieve on their own. The ZPS team offers technical resources with intimate knowledge of our platform and technology, maximizing positive outcomes on engagements.

ZPS includes the following types of offerings:

Live Broadcast Configuration, Monitoring, and Streaming Support

API Integrations & Solutions Architecture

Success Story - Live Broadcast Monitoring

Country Road TV needed support for Live Streaming a high profile concert at the Bluegrass Hall Of Fame and Museum in Kentucky.

Country Road Worked with ZPS to help with stream configuration, testing, live multicasting, and event monitoring. ZPS was able to provide full live broadcast support, including remediation of a local encoder issue, and the live event broadcast went off without a hitch!

Cinemoi needed to launch a new Samsung Galaxy application that included in-app purchase payment processing support integrated with Galaxy Pay.

Cinemoi worked with ZPS for the core app implementation, building some custom UX elements into the app, and Marketplace Connect integration for in-app subscription sign up and purchasing with Samsung Galaxy Pay.

With ZPS, Cinemoi was able to launch their new Samsung Galaxy app within 60 days of engagement!

Interested in working with ZPS on your next Go To Market engagement? Please contact your account manager or support team to learn more. If you're not a Zype customer yet, you can request a demo to learn more about working with Zype.

Get Better Outcomes with Zype Professional Services

First, it’s important to consider the market and look at what devices are the most popular. The top four streaming media devices today are Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast and Apple TV.

Smart TV’s are another large player, covering approximately 75% of the market and include mainstream TV manufacturers such as Samsung, Vizio, LG, and Sony.

Although market research is important to consider, the best device for your video business depends on your content, audience, and resources. Here are a few questions to ask yourself that will help you prepare for common, yet unexpected challenges of expanding with OTT.

When you launch an SVOD service, obviously you want to be distributing your content to as many endpoints as possible in order to reach the largest audience. Often times content owners are limited to supporting only one or two devices, especially at the time of launch. Supporting multiple devices brings content management challenges, not to mention apps can be costly, time-consuming and resource heavy.

One of the biggest challenges of supporting multiple devices is the fact that every device has completely different app development. That means that video businesses must develop different versions of their app for each device. If you want to support the 30% of Wi-Fi homes that use a Smart TV, that adds even more app versions.

Delivering a video app across every screen is complicated. Platforms are constantly evolving and often have multiple versions of the operating system. This means that multiple versions of your video app are required, in addition to the continual maintenance required to revise and update your apps whenever new versions are released.

Learn how The Film Detective navigated this challenge with Zype in order to easily build and publish custom set-top and mobile apps to deliver their content across web, mobile and Smart TV devices.

One of the most unexpected challenges for content owners is having to manage multiple assets to comply with each device’s content policies. Not every device is equal and some platforms have much stricter content restrictions than others.

This was a challenge for NightFlight when they added support for Amazon Fire TV, which had much more conservative content policies compared to what they were used to with Roku. They had to manage slightly different content assets for each device. Now, they have to create “clean versions of videos to release through Fire TV, or exclude some content altogether. Roku isn’t the only platform that restricts the type of content it allows, Apple TV also has it’s own set of restrictions.

Keeping track of which content is allowed through each platform can quickly spiral out of control. See how Zype helps Night Flight to easily control what content goes to each specific platform.

The age and demographics of your target audience is another important aspect to consider as you decide which devices to support. If your audience is younger, it’s especially important to have the ability to distribute your content on mobile. Smartphone video reaches almost twice as many millennials than those 50 and over. Millennials also use the connected television much more than older online video viewers. Both age groups use a computer to watch videos, but older viewers prefer the device more than the younger generation. To ensure you reach the broadest audience possible, it’s critical to launching apps on mobile, web and connected TVs. Learn how the SVOD service, The Rebel Media’s reaches an audience that has a wide range of ages and device preferences. Read more>>

Choosing the initial set of apps for your SVOD service is critical to your long-term success and there are many different aspects to consider. Get real-world insights to help you decide what devices are best for your SVOD service. Get the e-book Build, Launch, Grow today.

Challenges of Launching an SVOD Service - What Devices Should I Support?

Streaming TV is officially the new norm and so are viewer’s expectations to consume content seamlessly across all their devices. Connected TV devices like Roku, ChromeCast, and Apple TV are now the fourth most popular method of streaming TV after smartphones, tablets and Smart TVs.

The popularity of connected TV devices continues to grow with a total of 168 million users in the U.S. alone (up 10% from last year). The question remains, which devices are winning?

Smart TVs currently lead the pack, accounting for about half of the total connected TV users. That’s not to say the third-party OTT streaming devices by Roku, Amazon, Apple and Google are too far behind. Roku, is the most popular connected TV device, followed closely by Google’s ChromeCast and Amazon’s FireTV.  AppleTV comes in last, which isn’t surprising considering it is by far the most expensive connected TV device and isn’t focused on original content.

One thing is clear, if content owners don’t have an app in at least one of these marketplaces, they risk missing out on a major portion of today's OTT market share.

Zype makes it easy to build and publish your own custom OTT app for Roku and AmazonFire TV, learn more by requesting a demo today!

The Landscape of Today's OTT Device Marketplace

With fresh updates to the Zype platform like new playlist options and analytics expansions, Zype has been spreading the winter joy. Plus, check out a few new great OTT apps in the marketplace!

You can now build playlists based off categories, which is an easy way to populate new playlists with videos that have matching categories. This feature also automatically adds new videos to categorize playlists when you assign category values to them! For example, if you add new videos to your Zype library, once you tag them with the appropriate category, they will be automatically added to your category playlist.

You can also set smart ordering rules in playlists, which allows you to easily order videos in a playlist, and ensure that additional videos added to the playlist will follow the same rules. We have a wide range of preset ordering options, including publish date, created date, and alphabetical order.

Analytics: VOD, Download, and Total Hours

We had some pretty major analytics additions in the past month. The revamped analytics dashboard now keeps track of VOD stream hours, download stream hours, and total stream hours (VOD, downloaded and live content). This will enable you to keep track of how hours of each type of content are being watched.

We’ve rolled out some enhancements to the new Consumer Analytics feature. At launch, the feature allowed you to track analytics for an individual consumer such as video player impressions, geographies, devices, players, and revenue models. Now we’ve added the ability to track video plays, average play time, and total hours watched for an individual consumer. You can also click into each of these modules to get a more detailed look at which videos the consumer is playing.

Don’t let the holiday season wreak more havoc than it’s supposed to. Keep fit during the holiday season with Crunch Live, now on Samsung . With a wide variety of exercise routines, you can find your perfect workout that aligns with your schedule. Crunch Live uses Zype to publish apps on multiple platforms, including AFTV, Apple TV and Roku.

Catch your favorite black and white films on The Film Detective, now on Apple TV! With classics like A Christmas Carol and Sherlock Holmes - Dressed to Kill , the selection is hard to beat. Like Crunch Live, The Film Detective uses Zype for multi-platform publishing, and monetization.

What's New At Zype — December 2016

Free Ad Supported Streaming: Tap Into the Massive Audience Behind the Free TV Movement

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