Content, Connected: The Power of Branded Apps: Part 2

In Part 1, we explored how a branded app can complement wider distribution by giving content owners greater control over the audience relationship. Part 2 looks at what it takes to keep that owned experience running and evolving.

Launching a branded streaming app is a significant milestone. But operationally, it is only the beginning.

Once an app is live, the catalogue continues to change. New content arrives, audiences use different devices, monetisation strategies develop and the experience itself needs to keep improving.

For content owners, that means the decision to launch an app shouldn’t only consider what it takes to build the experience. It should also consider what it takes to operate and evolve it.

What happens after launch?

Running a streaming service involves much more than maintaining an interface.

Content needs to be managed. The experience needs to perform reliably across devices. Audiences need intuitive ways to discover, navigate and return to content. Monetisation needs to work alongside the viewing experience. Performance needs to be understood and the service needs to evolve without every change becoming a new technical project.

This is where flexibility becomes important. As catalogues and audience behaviour change, content owners need to be able to adapt how content is organised and showcased, evolve discovery experiences and use audience insights to understand what’s working.

All of this sits behind an experience that, to the viewer, should feel simple.

Ownership doesn’t require doing everything in-house

Behind that simplicity can sit significant operational complexity.

Our latest Industry Insights research found that 65% of content owners surveyed are already using some form of consolidated partner model or actively evaluating consolidation.

But consolidation isn’t simply about reducing the number of vendors. Our research points to the importance of reducing handoffs between disconnected workflows so that different parts of the content operation can work more effectively together.

The same principle applies to branded apps. Adding an owned destination shouldn’t mean adding another operational silo. There is an important distinction between owning the audience experience and owning every piece of technology required to deliver it.

A content owner may want control over its brand, catalogue, viewing experience, audience insights and monetisation strategy without building the infrastructure or expanding internal resources to operate a streaming service across every device.

A streaming experience should be built to keep evolving

This changes what content owners should expect from a technology partner.

Rather than delivering an app as a standalone project, the objective should be to support an experience that can evolve alongside the content and audience, while connecting with the wider technology and workflows behind it.

Rakuten TV Enterprise approaches this from the perspective of a streaming operator as well as a technology provider. The technology behind our White-Label OTT Apps is informed by more than 16 years of operating Rakuten TV across more than 150 million devices.

That means dealing with the realities that come after launch: evolving interfaces, managing content at scale, supporting different monetisation models, understanding performance and maintaining experiences across device environments.

A branded app should create greater control over the audience relationship without creating another layer of operational complexity behind it.