You know and have likely engaged them: companies with technologies serving a variety of industries and sectors. Perhaps there’s a comfort level with their brand or management team. Or, maybe their marketing prowess is next-level, and their ubiquity is intriguing. These are all understandable reasons for considering vendors offering point solutions (UX, analytics, personalization, voice search). However, they don’t justify completely ceding your entertainment-specific needs to them.
The Risks of Generic Solutions
We get it: the abundance of direct-to-consumer streaming services and MVPDs presents lucrative growth opportunities for technology vendors that have traditionally served outside industries. It’s understandable they’d look to diversify with entertainment/media offerings in order to capture a share of the huge projected spends in the vertical.
But, consideration must be given to the possible adverse outcomes of engaging non-specialized vendors for entertainment needs:
- Slower speed to market
Lack of expertise impacts planning, budgets, product integration and successful execution.
- Average user experience
True personalization should go beyond tinkering with off-the-shelf solutions and collaborative filtering scripts. Viewers expect much more than a simply acceptable attempt at individualized targeting.
- Less solving, more problems
Much of the work necessary for ramping up a solid viewership and behavioral analytics platform involves preparing the data for study – ingesting, transposing, pre-processing. This process is unnecessarily complex when a tool is not programmatically built for that data. There are no actionable insights without embedded industry expertise and established use cases.
Specialization Is Key
At TiVo, we’ve spent a decade fine-tuning our entertainment content discovery and user experience products and services. At our core, we have an end-to-end understanding of the video consumer, based on a massive user footprint.
Here’s what this expertise offers your business:
- Accelerated innovation
An entertainment-focused, consumer-driven roadmap can give your video service or direct-to-consumer business a competitive edge, optimizing emerging trends in user experience, viewer engagement and churn reduction. This advantage is invaluable, especially when viewers are deciding whether or not to stick with your service.
- Reduced opex costs
Specialized solutions like TiVo’s personalized content discovery offerings enable avoidance of onerous product integration processes. By eliminating the custom development work, system design and data analysis necessary when products aren’t designed around your data, viewer experiences and combined in-house and third-party tech stack design, you’ll reduce opex and improve overall margin.
- Prioritized Needs
With a specialized team, your problems are actively being solved before you even know they exist. Customer success, development and product teams understand your business and aren’t being distracted by the specialized needs of adjacent industries like e-commerce, digital media, healthcare or finance.
Entertainment Domain Expertise in Practice
As the only provider of an integrated solution combining personalized search and recommendations, voice interaction, predictive churn/engagement analytics and deep descriptive metadata, TiVo is a one-stop-shop with a successful track record supporting our singular-focus strategy.
Read our latest churn report, Retention, Revenue and Recommendations, to learn more.
Download the report.