Over-the-top (OTT) streaming has been on the up and up, and it’s recently reached a new major milestone. In July 2022, streaming services collected a 34.8% share of total TV consumption in the US, beating out cable for the first time in history. First, it was Blockbuster—and now cable.
More people are cutting the cable and turning to OTT platforms for entertainment, and companies are following the trend. Fortunately, modern-day software solutions make it easier than ever for businesses (big and small) to provide top-notch video experiences at scale.
OTT platforms help businesses upload, transcode, host, deliver, and monetize video content. Local sports, faith groups, online courses, TV series, and publishers take advantage of this technology to reach their audiences with faster, higher-quality video experiences.
New to OTT streaming? You’ve come to the right place. Below, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about OTT platforms. We’ll show you must-have features, examples, the best OTT streaming services, tips for choosing the right solution for your business, and how to get started.
OTT is a digital distribution method where content is delivered and consumed over the internet rather than through traditional cable or satellite. It’s the way you watch streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.
OTT platforms let businesses upload, host, and deliver content over the web. They provide the features, infrastructure, and support necessary to transcode millions of gigabytes of video content for consumption across countries, devices, languages, and internet speeds.
Whether you want to sell developer courses, local sports streaming, films, or TV series, OTT platforms empower your business to build custom-made streaming services for your customers. You get to customize the player, user experience, and monetization methods specifically for your content and audience.
For example, you could use an OTT platform to monetize your video content with the following methods:
Your audience can consume OTT content in a multitude of ways, which is one of the primary advantages OTT has over cable and satellite solutions. Customers can start streaming your content on their phone, switch over to their laptop, and finish on the smart TV.
Here are all the ways modern-day consumers are watching OTT content:
OTT devices can turn any TV into a streaming solution. Some smart TVs come with over-the-top streaming built in, while others will need additional hardware. This equipment is purpose-made to enable OTT. Here are a few examples of OTT devices:
Modern-day video consumers also watch content on their laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. These devices primarily serve other purposes, but they’re built with the technology necessary for OTT consumption.
The differences between OTT and traditional TV have continued to grow as technology and cloud-based applications evolve. Here are a few of the critical distinctions:
If you want to create your own OTT apps, here’s what that process would entail:
As you can see, developing and managing your own OTT apps is expensive and time consuming. A better alternative is to use an existing OTT app provider, like JW Player, and white labeling their technology.
In 2014, the percentage of U.S. households without a traditional TV subscription was 18.8%. By 2022, that figure had grown to a whopping 55%. People are increasingly “cutting the cord” because there are so many alternatives to cable subscriptions. As traditional subscriptions dwindle, OTT apps have risen to the top as more flexible, affordable, faster, and better alternatives.
These apps are democratizing broadcasting by allowing anyone to publish content through platforms like YouTube and professional OTT platforms such as JWP.
Additionally, OTT apps increase media accessibility, requiring only an internet connection and a device to watch content, eliminating the need for costly hardware and contracts.
Finally, they offer a wide range of choices, from Smart TV to mobile apps, catering to the increasing trend of streaming through mobile devices.
You’re probably wondering what type of OTT apps are out there and which ones are worth investing in. Here’s a quick overview:
Here’s why OTT providers should look into setting up detailed analytics for their content.
OTT platforms provide you with all the pre-made tools you need to deliver content to your audience. Solutions like JW Player give your developers APIs, SDKs, and OTT apps to empower your teams to build video into any application:
Optimizing for a seamless viewing experience with reduced buffering and high-quality resolution is crucial. Moreover, OTT platforms provide monetization options through ads or subscriptions, ensuring secure revenue generation.
These platforms also provide data rights management (DRM) solutions to protect your content regardless of the device or region.
Finally, an enterprise-quality OTT platform also prevents trust-breaking outages and service disruptions. When you host all your videos on your own server, you’re vulnerable to downtime. OTT platforms tend to take a multi-CDN (content delivery network) approach that ensures your consumers never experience any downtime, regardless of failures at single server locations.
While we believe any business can benefit from an OTT platform, these are the industries that will profit the most:
Live TV and film broadcasters need platforms to host and deliver live and VOD content. Broadcasters need a service they can trust for 24/7 streams and events at high resolutions. They also need a platform that can quickly convert live-streamed content into video on demand, helping them capitalize and maximize profits on every piece of content they produce.
Fitness classes are moving from the studios into the homes with the help of live streaming and VOD content. Enterprise-grade platforms help you avoid tempo-disrupting buffering while serving your content to audiences of any size.
Advanced platforms also let you customize your player to match your brand and workout. Plug your videos (live or VOD) into your mobile application or OTT-connected devices to empower your customers to easily take the workout from their living room to the basement to the gym.
Add video lectures to your online course or mobile application to take learning to the next level. Whether you’re hosting a single class or an entire catalog of courses, use a platform to host, organize, and deliver first-class video experiences at scale.
Unlike YouTube or Vimeo, OTT platforms like JW Player let you provide an on-brand experience and promote your own videos—when your audience finishes the first lecture, they get prompted with your relevant content instead of your competitors’.
Stream on-demand and live sporting events to your audience. Feature everything from your local professional teams to high school playoffs to the regional pickleball tournament. OTT platforms help you deliver this content with a 99.99% global delivery time, ensuring nobody misses an important play because of an outage or loading icon.
More church services are moving from the chapel to the internet thanks to the ease and convenience of OTT platforms. Broadcast your live lectures to your audience via your website or application, and quickly convert your lectures into videos to engage your audience and further monetize your content.
Professional video game streamers need platforms they can trust to capture and deliver high-quality content without compromising their performance. Audiences want to engage with live videos and on-demand video, meaning you need transcoding and hosting you can trust.
There’s a good chance you’ve already engaged with an OTT service today—whether you watched a quick YouTube video or put on a Disney+ TV show for your kids. Here are a few common examples of companies using OTT streaming services:
Big-name companies like Netflix and Hulu might dominate the streaming landscape, but there is still a place for your business. Communities and consumers demand niche content that the industry leaders just aren’t providing, and you have the chance to capitalize on the interest.
Here’s a look at how our own customers are getting creative and building unique video streaming services:
Knowledge Network is an independent (free and ad-free) publicly funded educational cable TV network in British Columbia. They needed a digital solution that was affordable but also could deliver content at the scale they imagined. After switching from traditional to OTT, they grew viewership by 55% over the next couple of years.
Q.Digital is the world’s largest LGBTQ-owned and run media network, reaching 9.5 million people each month. The network used JW Player’s OTT platform to embed video players across their site in the sidebars and landing pages. The result? Q.Digital increased monthly video plays by 10,976% (not a typo) and grew ad impressions by 25,791% (again, not a typo).
OTT platforms have made it simple for any company to get serious about video content—the hardest part is choosing the right one. Searching across the internet (and our list below), it’s hard to narrow down your options and find the best OTT platform.
To complicate the matter further, there’s no one-size-fits-all platform for everyone out there. Some OTT platforms cater better to startups and small businesses, while others provide more enterprise-level hosting and performance.
All in all, it’s a lot to consider—so we wanted to help by highlighting a few key decision-making criteria:
Look for an OTT platform with a multi-CDN. Single CDN solutions are still vulnerable to outages and service disruptions. A multi-CDN approach gives you a fallback plan in case a single CDN goes down, and it also expands your geographic distribution and performance.
For example, JW Player’s multi-CDN solution gives you points of presence (POPs) in 130+ countries. Think about your business’s future direction. While you might be delivering to a single region at the moment, consider a solution that won’t limit you if you decide to expand to an international audience down the road.
Find a service that’ll transcode your content uploads for various resolutions and devices. You want to ensure that your desktop and mobile users have a great viewing experience, regardless of their location or internet bandwidth.
It doesn’t matter how affordable or sophisticated your OTT platform is if the back end is too difficult to navigate. Find a solution with an easy-to-use user interface (UI) for your program managers.
While you’re at it, find a solution your developers will love. You’ll want a platform with APIs and SDKs for building whatever your content needs—and this functionality needs to be backed up with sufficient documentation and world-class support.
Choose a platform that lets you monetize with a variety of options. You might want to offer your audience different viewership tiers, and you need a platform that’ll enable that functionality. For example, you might want to let viewers watch your content for free with advertisements while still offering an ad-free subscription option. Popular OTT streaming services like Hulu and Peacock take advantage of these pricing models.
Video performance is a non-negotiable element when choosing your OTT platform. Your audience needs to be able to watch content in a variety of formats that’ll meet their device and internet connection’s minimum requirements. The same goes for your live streams—find a platform that reduces latency issues and prioritizes the viewer’s experience.
Data helps you make decisions about the future content you produce for your audience. Choose a platform that lets you gain valuable insights into how your viewers watch and engage with your content. Ideally, find a platform with real-time metrics to enable you to make decisions faster, especially when it comes to live video.
Safeguard your content with a DRM solution made for video content. You need security features like HLS token signing, 24/7 monitoring, and geo-blocking to ensure that only paying customers (with the right permissions) get access to your content.
Watching a video is just the first step in your customer’s journey. You want to lead them down your pipeline to discover other pieces of content and articles relevant to what they’re viewing. Find a solution with rich engagement features that’ll keep your audience entertained and watching for longer.
Reliable support is a crucial factor to consider when choosing an OTT platform. Ideally, you would look for a multi-CDN network that guarantees excellent video quality with low latency and uptime. Additionally, your business could benefit from an in-house NOC team performing round-the clock monitoring. If you want enhanced availability during peak demand, opt for a highly scalable cloud-based solution. Ultimately, automated alerts and flexible Support SLA packages will provide added reliability and convenience.
Find an OTT platform that offers flexible subscriptions and payments, global authentication, and customizable branded experience. At the same time, control of the subscriber lifecycle with identity management and ensure user security with data compliance. For the optimal experience, easily authenticate users with integrated APIs.
Regardless of the features and functionality, you can’t choose a platform you can’t afford. Talk to sales teams at the OTT platforms you’re interested in to get demos, walkthroughs, and personalized quotes. Armed with this information, you’ll have everything you need to make the best financial decisions for your business.
Furthermore, find a platform with a free trial. This will let you get hands-on experience with the product before you even think about taking your credit card out, ensuring your personal interactions dictate the best product for your business.
We narrowed down your options to help you find the right OTT platform for your business. Below, you’ll find the seven best OTT platforms for 2023. We also used popular review sites like G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra to find customer-verified pros and cons of the software.
JWP is the go-to OTT platform for over 40,000 publishers and broadcasters. With our platform, companies can effortlessly stream videos, engage audiences across various screens, and effectively monetize their content.
Plus, it’s developer-friendly with easy-to-use APIs and native SDKs for app development. On top of that, JWP’s video player embraces cutting-edge technologies like MPEG-DASH protocol, simulcasting to Facebook Live, multi-bitrate streaming, and plenty more.
Read through our main selling points and see how our complete online video solution empowers businesses:
To take our stellar tools for a test-drive, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial today. When you decide JWP’s the solution for you, contact our sales team to work out a price depending on the features you need.
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Kaltura is an open-source video management platform that focuses primarily on educational content. Users have complete flexibility when it comes to designing their video player, allowing them to adjust colors, branding, and even available features.
Thanks to its open-source roots, everything can be built and changed with custom integrations and community-sourced add-ons. Here’s what you can expect if you sign up:
In terms of pricing, Kaltura offers a “pay-as-you-go” model. What’s more, you can choose a plan or mix and match solutions to make the most out of your subscription. Quotes are available upon contacting the sales team.
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Dacast provides a live streaming and VOD platform for small-to-medium-sized companies and enterprise businesses. It’s best known for providing top-notch international streaming experiences thanks to its CDN approach, and it has a reliable technical support team for helping companies to overcome setup hurdles.
The platform’s password protection ensures secure distribution of video content to global audiences, while its user-friendly interface simplifies the streaming process. We gathered some of their key features:
You can explore Dacast starting at only $39 for the Starter plan, or you can upgrade to the Event ($63/per month) or the Scale ($165/month) tier.
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Wistia is a video platform built for marketing teams and content creators. It provides easy-to-use non-technical features for creating, hosting, marketing, and analyzing video content.
Wistia integrates with your marketing tech stacks and workflows to make video a seamless extension of all your marketing activities. While Wistia doesn’t provide live-streaming video options, it has launched a webinar product. Some of their main features include:
Four pricing plans are available if you wish to use Wistia’s platform. The Plus plan comes at only $24 per month, while the Pro and Advanced levels cost $99 and $399 per month, respectively. For custom features, you can check out their Premium plan.
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Vidyard is an OTT platform specializing in video solutions for marketing and sales teams. It provides built-in tools for search engine optimization, lead generation, email capture, viewer engagement, and more.
Furthermore, Vidyard empowers sales reps to quickly record and send videos to potential clients with easy-to-use screen and webcam recording features and templates. Have a peek at their stand-out features:
All of the above could be yours for free if you sign up for Vidyard’s base plan. If your needs exceed the free plan’s limits, you can opt for the Pro plan starting at $19. For more advanced features, contact the sales team to book a demo.
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Muvi is an OTT tool designed for building your own video streaming platform (like Netflix or Hulu). It provides a complete white-label experience for products, meaning you get your own domain name and custom player branding.
Moreover, Muvi has one of the industry’s strongest audio-only streaming options, making it easy for businesses to add podcasts and music to their list of offerings. Have a look at their list of features:
Similar to the rest of the OTT platforms on our list, Muvi has four pricing plans. The cheapest option is the Standard plan at $399 per month. The Professional tier costs $1,499 monthly, while the Enterprise tier will set you back $3,900 per month. Custom plans are also available.
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Originally a consumer-grade video hosting provider and YouTube competitor, Vimeo later shifted its focus to cater to the creative market, attracting filmmakers, graphic designers, and artists.
In 2017, Vimeo acquired Livestream, expanding its offerings to include both on-demand and live video services. Today, Vimeo serves as a high-end OTT platform using Livestream’s technology, making it an excellent choice for media businesses. Take a look at what they offer:
After completing your one week free trial, you can choose one of Vimeo’s three pricing tiers. Their Starter plan costs just $12 per seat/month, while the Standard and Advanced tiers cost $20 and $65 per seat/month, respectively. For additional Enterprise features, you can contact the sales team.
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As a subsidiary of IBM, a renowned leader in the tech industry, IBM Cloud brings significant credibility to the table. The platform excels in providing reliable video hosting solutions for both live streaming and on-demand video.
What’s more, IBM Cloud Video has recently introduced video monetization tools, offering broadcasters to generate revenue. Take a look at what else they have in store:
These features are available at several price points after the 30-day free trial. You can choose from the three price levels: Silver (starting at $129 per month), Gold (starting at $649 per month), and Platinum (starting at $1,299 per month).
Alternatively, you can contact IBM Cloud video about custom pricing for additional features.
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When it comes to the best OTT platforms, Wowza stands out with its comprehensive solutions that cater to various industries. With its own content delivery networks (CDNs), Wowza ensures reliable global content delivery.
Wowza’s expertise in live streaming is exemplified through its patented software. Namely, the Extensible Modular Architecture allows for immediate scalability of live streams, guaranteeing an exceptional viewing experience. Here are some of their key features:
Wowza’s pricing structure includes several tiers, designed to be flexible and cater to the diverse needs of its users.
That being said, the monthly subscription tier is the most cost-effective option, costing $25 per month for Wowza Video and $195 per month for Wowza Streaming Engine.
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SproutVideo is an OTT platform based in Brooklyn, offering an extensive list of powerful marketing tools. The platform caters to the needs of leading OTT content providers while also providing comprehensive support for live streaming and on-demand video hosting through various business apps.
It’s primarily designed with business broadcasting in mind, empowering organizations to effectively deliver content to target audiences. Here’s what you can expect if you sign up:
You can choose one of SproutVideo’s four pricing plans, starting at only $10 for the Sprout plan and going up to $295 for the Forest tier.
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VPlayed is a reputable player in the OTT industry, providing a comprehensive OTT solution tailored to media broadcasters, television production houses, and content owners.
Their white-label monetization platform empowers content creators to stream high-quality video across various devices. VPlayed’s main selling point is its customization, allowing businesses to create a fully personalized OTT platform. Here are some other major benefits to consider:
To find out the total cost of VPlayed’s solution, book a demo with their sales team.
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Brid.TV is an enterprise-level OTT platform supporting worldwide video broadcasting on PCs, mobile devices, and tablets. What sets Brid.TV apart from its competitors is its partnership with leading ad providers, bolstering video revenue-building strategies.
Through collaborations with giants like Google ADX, users gain valuable insights into the generated revenue and effortlessly expand their video reach. Read through some of their highlight features:
Brid.TV is quite flexible in terms of pricing, offering a free trial and a free plan. However, if your business requires additional features, you can reach out to their team for a demo and custom prices.
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Streann offers an innovative “Smart OTT” platform designed to empower broadcasters to create content distribution apps for their users.
The platform provides a professional broadcasting experience, making it an ideal choice for large companies with intricate needs. Their list of features includes:
Streann’s software comes at two different price points. To find out how much each plan costs, you need to book a demo.
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Another big name in the OTT industry, Setplex provides comprehensive IPTV solutions for operators and OTT service providers. With a focus on innovation, the platform excels in delivering custom-tailored solutions for the unique needs of each client.
Embracing the belief that the future of television lies in OTT, their solutions encourage operators to offer live TV, catch-up TV, VOD, and interactive features across devices. Read along for their most prominent features:
Since Setplex offers custom solutions, their pricing levels will depend on what kind of features you are aiming for. To get a personalized quote, book a demo.
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Brightcove is an enterprise-grade OTT platform designed to host and build video streaming services. With the platform, businesses get access to first-class CDNs, APIs, integrations, and broadcasting features.
Its comprehensive suite of tools and features allows content creators to seamlessly deliver on-demand videos, live streams and interactive content to global audiences, while maintaining high-quality playback. Their offer includes:
Brightcove’s OTT pricing options are designed to meet the needs of top-tier professionals on the market. For those interested in their services, contact Brightcove directly to receive a custom plan.
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Despite OTT’s market emergence and dominance, it’s still relatively new to the world. While it might seem like a lifetime ago, most of us weren’t walking around with smartphones until fairly recently. The future of OTT streaming is young and full of potential, and here are our predictions for where it’s heading next.
Don’t settle for just any old OTT platform—choose one that’s purpose-built for your needs. We built JW Player to be a complete video platform for your company to connect and engage with your audience on a deeper level, regardless of their device, location, or bandwidth.
Experience the ease of uploading, organizing, and delivering video content with JWP.
Start your 30-day free trial today to access full API and SDK capabilities (plus 25GB hosting and 75GB streaming).