A user's perception is your reality: Brightcove's Carolyn Pampino

Carolyn Pampino, vice-president of design, Brightcove, talks about the role user interface plays in the success of an OTT

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video recorded the biggest gains in unique visitors, while Hotstar, Zee5 and Voot saw their numbers drop in April when most OTT platforms had a rush in consumption, according to comScore. One of the factors, say analysts, is that the user interface for many of OTTs is clunky. For older users who came on board during the lockdown, simplicity of use was a big factor. Carolyn Pampino, vice-president of design, Brightcove, tells Vanita Kohli-Khandekar about the role user interface plays in the success of an OTT. (The $185-million, Boston-headquartered Brightcove offers an array of products and services for publishing, distributing, measuring and monetising video across devices. It has over 5,000 customers across the world, many of them in India.) Edited excerpts of the interview:

Is user interface a big factor in the success of OTTs? How do you quantify its importance?

Every aspect impacts a user’s perception of your company. A good design principle is to accept that a user’s perception is your reality.

This perception is formed over a series of interactions, positive or negative. The interactions we remember the most are our first impression, the highly positive, the highly negative and the last interaction. One bad experience could cost a viewer. And typically, once the trust is lost, that viewer does not come back.

Take, for example, someone who has just got their first smartphone and finally has enough money to buy content. While their anticipation is high, they are more likely to accept occasional buffering because they are simply happy to finally have access. On the other hand, a viewer with multiple devices and cash flow will have higher expectations, and therefore, less patience with difficult or sub-standard interactions.

To design for this reality, an OTT service must understand its target audience and take every detail into consideration: how it generates demand, the cost of the service, the number of ads run, the number of apps provided, how well video streams in low latency situations….

Once the content is playing, the interface should recede into the background. Basic functions such as pause, rewind, fast-forward and volume need to be easily accessed when needed and otherwise remain out of the way.

To start watching on one device, such as a smartphone, and to be able to naturally resume watching the same video on another device, such as a smart TV or computer, positively impacts the experience.

Globally, which are the best OTT brands from a user interface perspective? For instance, everyone is gaga over the Netflix interface.

Without a doubt, large technology and media companies are well known for both their user experience and user interface. Most do a good job of making the user experience as frictionless as possible and promoting content consumption. But they also invest upwards of a billion dollars in their technology platform.

For example, Netflix invests $1.5 billion in tech annually. To compete, OTT services can seek a video platform vendor that removes the barrier to entry by hiding all of the user experience and user interface complexities that we discussed. He must ensure three things. One, deliver appropriately rendered video to match the bandwidth requirements that can scale to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers without glitches.

Two, create branded apps that comply with Operating System guidelines for all devices, increasing the ability to reach viewers on the device of their preferences.
 

Three, ensure the provider can support delivering apps and content in multiple languages. The more an OTT service can cater to the native language speaker, the better chance it has of attracting and retaining loyal fans. The streaming wars are on, so picking the right video platform vendor frees the OTT service provider to focus on growing the business.

Is there any way to quantify the OTT app’s efficiency and what it means for usage?
 

Some of the metrics to measure efficiency are app usage over time, subscriber growth, views and video completion rates and high rating on app stores. The main objective for an OTT mobile app is to increase and extend viewing time, and the user interface is designed with this in mind: from countdown timer to the next episode; to content recommendations based on what the viewer has watched; to showing the newest content at the top whenever the viewer opens the app — all designed to minimise “stop-watching” cues, and increase and extend viewing time.

Another metric to measure app usage and adoption is how receptive viewers are to paying for the service and which monetisation models is preferred (SVOD, AVOD or TVOD — subscription, ad-based or transactional video on demand).