If You Build It (a Targeted TV Solution) – They Might Not Come
Anna Aleksandrowicz
Have you ever heard the saying “if you want to get something done – do it yourself?” Well, in turns out that adage doesn’t always work in the world of Targeted TV (TTV). Understandably, companies want to control the user experience (UX) of their customers so that they can provide a unique solution that different from the competition.
But beyond the functionality and features that the company wants to control and to build on their own, there’s a lot more to creating a TTV experience than having a cool UI or cool app. And that’s the stuff that far more difficult to develop. And we’re hearing similar feedback from customers, namely that developing an entire TTV solution in-house – for most companies – simply isn’t feasible, regardless of whether your market is the Americas, Europe or Asia.
Where to Draw the Line
A good TTV solution needs to stand out of the crowd; this is the stuff you’re going to want to control yourself, so the UX and the UI should be designed (if not built) in-house. In the background, you’ll need a solid, reliable framework on which to build your UI. This should allow you to create a TTV that’s highly customized and branded for your company.
On the backend, there are far more complex issues that need to be figure out, such how much work is needed to get to a viable product that includes subscriptions, user management, and more. For example, if you look at the architecture that’s behind the Kaltura TV Platform, you’ll see that all the critical infrastructure components, which are quite difficult to develop, we’ve been developing for 10 years. These include the business logic, infrastructure for data analytics, processing needed for the UX infrastructure, managing content and metadata, user engagement infra, video processing and storage, and so on. Developing these capabilities and features takes a lot of time, effort and expertise, and the breadth of development and capabilities that are currently available are far more than a single company truly needs.
Building on a Generic Solution
Another idea that companies often embrace is to take a generic solution and build on that. You can then take the generic features – creating subscription offers, creating VOD collections, creating boxsets – and apply them to any company, enabling them to use that capability.
But what you need to remember is that a generic solution is not a commoditized solution – building a generic solution that can be modified is a very complex process. The combination of generic capabilities plus flexibility equals a solution that’s hard and labor intensive and requires expertise.
Developing Adapters Means Cost and Time-to-market Issues!
The other thing is that companies spend an extensive amount of time on is adapters; even if they develop the adapters in-house, they then need to deal with integrations. This is expensive to do and expensive to maintain. Add to that integration with backoffice systems, ad networks, etc. means that building set of adaptors and adapter platform that allows low maintenance of thee integrations, of the core platform with these capabilities can get quite costly.
In addition, iterations are sometimes hardcoded, so that you’ll need to rewrite them every time you add new feature or make a change.
