OTT as a Source of Growth and Revenue for Telcos

The impact of multi-sided online-based services or Over-the-top (OTT) platforms has been all but good on the telecommunication industry over the past few years. Major drivers for this change include, shift in consumer preferences and the evolution of innovative services, in messaging, voice and video content.

This rapid adoption and piggybacking of OTT services on Telcom network infrastructures have led to an exponential growth in the demand of data traffic. Global mobile data traffic is expected to have edged up to 51 EB per month (Exabyte) at the end of 2020. With an estimated figure of 226 EB per month in 2026.

Telcos, hence, are now on the lookout for alternate revenue models and sources. One such source can be a global OTT platform. Being an experience-based model, delivering entertainment through video streaming, music, and other content, OTT has so far been a farfetched idea for telcos.

Wide-spread adoption of 4G technologies and a move towards 5G puts an even greater emphasis on media content consumption. Telcos employing these technologies are at a bigger advantage. As they have the ability to bundle individual services and offer an even more captivating package to their users. This is evident by the research conducted by GSMA across the four major markets. The US, Spain, India, and China, where a majority of users showed preference towards operator led advanced services.

An own global OTT platform has the potential to attract millions of users. By providing additional services online across various platforms and cutting down all middle-men and extra costs. Globally, OTT revenues are projected to hit $167 billion by 2025. Over a double in comparison with $83 million in revenue in 2019. Likewise, users of subscription services are expected to reach 1.1 billion by 2025. Rising adoption of OTT platforms during 2020 has been a strong contributing factor to this surge in forecasts. Hence, with such impressive numbers and an impressive growth, it makes sense to grab a share of this market with a global OTT platform.

Contrary to popular belief, telcos don’t have to acquire a big media company or an OTT service to get into the OTT industry. In order to build an OTT platform, an organization needs a solution that has end-to-end workflow capability. From video ingestion, content and metadata management, DRM protection, integration of payment and catalog services, and finally delivery of content to millions of user devices.

Axinom is a leading digital solution’s provider in the media and entertainment industry. Serving the industry with scalable and robust digital services for content management and protection. Our digital services can help telcos build a highly scalable global platform.

Digital services we offer are a part of Axinom Mosaic, a modular digital assets processing, management, and deployment framework for building media solutions. Digital media workflows are simplified to a greater extent with solutions for media asset management (Axinom Media service), content protection with multi-DRM service (Axinom DRM) and services covering workflows for asset ingest & processing, handling subscribers, translations, image processing, payments, reporting, monetization, and much more. The framework is supported through a unified frontend and backend layer with shared communication infrastructure and an API-first design. It also facilitates numerous possibilities of integration with third-party or existing customer systems.

It is evident that OTT is the future of entertainment. With an OTT platform, telcos can build a revenue stream and growth that has been unexplored so far. In order to explore opportunities or for more information, have a chat with one of our experts right away.