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White-Label or Tailored?

OTT operators must decide whether to opt for a white-label solution or rely on customized backend services and client applications. We do not believe in rigid, fully white-label solutions, as each business has unique requirements. On the other hand, a fully tailored backend and frontend application incurs substantially higher costs. Therefore, we adopt an approach that falls in between. How can you determine which approach best suits your needs?

White-label OTT

If you need a quick, cost-effective solution to start publishing your content and you don't really need a lot of customizations, then white-label OTT is the way to go. There is no faster time to market. You never have lower initial development costs, and you can directly focus on monetization.

Disadvantages include vendor lock-in, which makes it hard to migrate away from the provider. You need to share your revenue, and most importantly, you are very limited in terms of customizations and flexibility.

Good luck if you need to integrate with partners, have a unique vision for your product, or get your application run on a specific set-top box.

Tailored OTT

On the other end of the scale, a fully tailored OTT approach gives you complete control over features, content, and infrastructure. You can implement any possible imaginable functionality that makes your service unique or integrates with our partners or other services.

If you also have a strong in-house dev team or a reliable partner, and a large enough audience to justify the custom infrastructure cost, this can be the right approach for you.

On the downsides are slower time to market and required budget.

Our Approach

The world is neither black nor white; there are thousands of shades of gray. Sometimes a white-label solution is the right thing to use, and sometimes it does not work out because of your specific needs.

We at Lovely Streaming count on given and proven services to handle supply chain (metadata, encoding, transcoding, etc.), content delivery and protection (DRM, CDN), players (open and closed source), data warehouse and analytics, advertising, and much more.

But we have tailored applications for web, mobile, and big screens as well as a tailored business logic to manage content orchestration, catalog management, accounts and profiles, device management, provisioning, subscription, and product management, in-app notifications, and more.

This gives you all the advantages of a tailored approach while ensuring that you do not pay for reinventing the wheel. The tailored parts are key to creating your unique experience, to fulfilling your business needs, to integrating with other partners like telecommunication providers, to deciding which payment provider you want to use. To be able to build an app for a specific set-top box. To include your non-video content, and more.

You might argue that in exchange for these benefits, you pay the cost of the tailored apps and backend. To ensure we are effective and efficient, we focus on these key ideas:

  • streamline the development by using multiplatform applications to avoid writing the same feature multiple times
  • share and reuse code
  • never lock in

Summing up.

A white-Label solution works well for some use cases, but it's not suitable for all. For greater flexibility, a more tailored approach is necessary. However, building everything from scratch is not cost-effective or economically viable. That's why we aim to strike a balance between standard features that can be shared across projects and the custom needs of each one. We are not focused on mass production or scaling a white-label solution to hundreds of customers. We are focused on projects with unique, custom requirements.

Discover our experience with white-label solutions in a specific project in this Blog Post

Manfred Schwendinger Now, let’s talk.