With cord-cutting on the rise, over-the-top (c) white label services are making their mark on the digital landscape by changing the way content creators distribute and monetize their videos. OTT white label services allow content creators to control the user experience while growing their audience by vastly improving their reach. Let’s look at the top 3 OTT white label services on the market today.

1 TV Startup

TV Startup offers excellent flexibility so you can have complete control over how your content is presented and monetized. They offer the ability to utilize scheduled playlists for always-on live TV broadcasting, the creation of Netflix-style video on demand (VOD), and live streaming that automatically archives your footage for future distribution purposes. You can even restream your content to social media platforms to access your entire audience from a single content management system.

In terms of monetization, TV Startup delivers on the promise of giving you total control over your content. You can use dynamic ad insertion (DAI), subscription-based access, pay-per-view, or any combination of the above to turn your passion into a lucrative career. Thanks to their analytics tools, it’s easy to maximize your earnings potential and audience growth with TV Startup’s OTT service.

TV Startup offers setup and monthly pricing with the ability to save money by taking advantage of their bundling options for bringing your content to practically any platform. TV Startup offers the best in terms of control over your content and ease of use.

2 IBM Video Streaming

IBM is a giant in the tech industry with a storied history dating back to the early days of the industry itself. The IBM Video Streaming service provides a cloud platform for streaming, hosting videos, and performing analytics.

As you would expect from a tech giant, their service is quite full-featured with things like mobile compatibility, customizable channel pages, and archived broadcasts. Their analytics features are great, but IBM’s Video Streaming service can be a bear to work with thanks to its bloated feature set.

IBM offers a 30-day free trial for its video streaming platform, but it’s more of a training wheels session than anything with its limitations of only 5 concurrent viewers and no ability to test ads during this period. Their pricing structure is fairly rigid and doesn’t allow for any real customization.

3 Muvi

An excellent service, Muvi offers live streaming, video on demand, and audio streaming services. Despite its name, Muvi focuses a little bit more on audio services, but their video services are also quite customizable and feature-packed.

Muvi offers a wide range of monetization tools similar to TV Startup which gives content creators great flexibility when it comes to how they want users to access their product. On the downside, Muvi is definitely not cheap.

Their basic plan starts at $399/month with additional fees tacked on. This plan only allows for 2000 concurrent viewers with higher viewer counts locked behind much more expensive tiers. To access unlimited concurrent users, it’s going to cost a minimum of $8900/month. Their services are great, but their prices can be a bitter pill to swallow for many.

Conclusion

Going OTT is a great way to cut out the middle-man and take complete control over your content distribution and monetization. You can start your own Internet TV network through the use of white label services.

TV Startup offers flexibility and end-to-end control over your content. See for yourself how it works by scheduling a live TV Startup demo. Get in touch with the TV Startup experts today to learn more.

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It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t heard the phrase “content is king”, but what exactly does that mean? The origin of the phrase can be traced back to none other than the technology luminary Mr. Bill Gates who said, “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”

Penned as the opening statement of Bill Gates’ 1996 essay titled “Content is King”, these words have proven true over the years while remaining just as relevant today as the day he wrote them. In his essay, Gates detailed his vision for the future of the Internet. The success of the Internet, according to Gates, would hinge upon the creation of content to fill its depths with something for everyone.

Those of us lucky enough to be alive today can attest to the importance of content and the potential value it can provide to organizations and consumers alike.

What Exactly IS Content?

Pulling from the well of Bill Gates’ essay again, he says in it, “When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide.” In loose terms, everything is or can be made into content. But just because anything can be content doesn’t mean all content is equally valuable.

You could throw together a 24/7 live stream of your daily life, but unless you’re Kim Kardashian, no one is going to want to sit around watching you run errands. Likewise, a stream of your cat napping all day is unlikely to gain much attention. However, these ideas and others like them aren’t inherently bad ideas for content. The hardest part of creating content is creating good content and even “bad” ideas can turn into good content with the proper approach.

But What is Good Content?

Content should be thought of as something that provides entertainment, information, or (ideally) both simultaneously. The most important consideration to make when creating good content is your audience. It’s impossible to make something interesting, informative, or fun without keeping the audience in mind throughout the entire content creation process.

Perhaps more importantly, you should consider whether the content provides value to your audience in some way. Time is an incredibly precious commodity and it should be treated as such. If you create your content with the value of your audience’s time in mind, you’re much more likely to create something that is actually worth their time.

This doesn’t mean good content is something made solely for the sake of the audience though. In fact, creating something that you personally have a passion for is a great way to boost the quality of your content. If you are intimately familiar with any facet of life, industry, or bizarrely specific subculture, that might be the best topic to center your content around.

It may not seem at first that there is a massive audience out there waiting for you to put out a 20-part series on the intricacies of flute making in the 12th Century. However, if you have a passion and deep knowledge of a topic, you can make it into something millions of people would want to watch.

Good content isn’t all about flashy marketing or high budgets. The History Channel got its start by using archived, public domain footage and simply adding narration on top of it to create hundreds of hours of content with very low production costs. Using public domain footage and other low-budget practices like how artist Lil Dicky made a rap video by asking people to allow him to film inside their mansions for free are excellent methods for creating great content on a low budget.

Good content is about creating something that you would find interesting or entertaining. Creating content that entertains while also informing is a surefire way to create something people will want to spend time watching.

Find the Right Home for Your Content

You handle the content. Let TV Startup help take care of the rest. Start your own Internet TV network and avoid expensive cable providers by going over-the-top (OTT). Launch your own Netflix-style service or get your channel on smart TVs, Roku, mobile devices, Apple TV, and more services across the globe.

See for yourself how it works by scheduling a live demo. We work hard to enable great video content creators like yourself to focus on creating amazing content while pocketing the money your hard work deserves. Get in touch with us today to learn more.

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It wasn’t too long ago when there were only a handful of TV channels and most of those wouldn’t even broadcast all day. Back in the “good ol’ days”, people didn’t have much in the way of choice when it came to watching television. You would sign up to whichever cable provider was in your area and pay whatever price they asked of you for spotty service and limited channel options.

This business model worked for cable providers because their customers had little if any choice in the matter. However, nothing lasts forever and when new options like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, and many others started sprouting up, people realized the big TV providers had been scalping them for years. These TV providers have proven too big and cumbersome to make sweeping changes and, as a result, they are steadily going the way of the dinosaurs.

Cable customers are cutting the cord at an accelerating rate over the past few years with a total 5.5 million subscribers terminating their contracts with TV providers last year alone—a 70% increase from 2018’s 3.2 million cord-cutters. Simultaneously, more households are becoming “cord nevers” (people who have never subscribed to TV providers and use on-demand services or the internet instead) than ever before.

We got to this place today where cable customers are leaving their providers in droves due to a large number of reasons that have made alternative TV options enticing and practical. Let’s look at two of the biggest factors that make cord-cutting viable and, more importantly, appealing to so many people.

Reason 1: The Internet

Sure, the Internet has been around for quite some time at this point, but it’s only recently that high-speed internet connections were made available and reasonably affordable to such a huge number of people. Modern-day internet is many orders of magnitude faster than yesteryear’s dial-up.

Fiber optic is becoming more common by the day with internet providers using this new technology to provide gigabytes per second connection speeds. Dial-up, on the other hand, caps out at a maximum theoretical speed of 56 kbps. That means modern internet speeds are roughly 18,000 times faster than dial-up. Soak in that number for a second while I catch my breath.

In other words, a gigabit internet connection can download a feature-length film with a file size of 800 MB in less than 10 seconds while it would take a dial-up connection roughly 9 DAYS to download the same file. You would have a hard time finding people willing to wait 9 days for a Netflix movie to load, but modern high-speed internet allows users to instantly access and stream content with virtually zero delay.

Reason 2: Cha-Ching

TV provider bills are notoriously expensive thanks to their use of fairly skeevy business practices. It’s amazing how you can sign up for a cable TV provider at the advertised $50/month and end up paying easily over $150 after additional fees are tacked on and the introductory rates come to an end.

More people are realizing every day that they can enjoy most if not all of the same content they love to watch through their TV providers on cheaper alternative options. It’s not hard to see why someone would want to switch from paying $150+ each month for TV service to a selection of services they handpicked that costs them less than the introductory prices offered by the cable companies.

The writing is on the wall for cable companies, but TV production companies are actually in a better place than ever thanks to new cable alternatives. With new content continuously popping up on Netflix and Hulu, just to name a couple, audiences have a wide breadth of entertainment choices.

How You Can Take Advantage of Cord Cutting

Consumers are rapidly shifting away from the prehistoric business models of TV providers and taking back control of their entertainment options and wallets. With big cable TV spiraling the drain, it might seem like an awful time to invest in a TV production company. However, the end of cable TV does not mean the demand for quality TV content has come to an end as well.

Luckily, there are options for content creators and production companies that don’t involve the monolithic cable companies of yesteryear. Believe it or not, you can start your own Internet TV network and avoid expensive cable providers by going over-the-top (OTT). Launch your own Netflix-style service or get your channel on smart TVs, Roku, mobile devices, Apple TV, and more services across the globe.
See for yourself how it works by scheduling a live demo. We work hard to enable great video content creators like yourself to pocket the money your hard work deserves. Get in touch with us today to learn more.

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