Headless CMS Use Case: OTT Video

Video is now more accessible than ever before as enterprises and media/entertainment brands are also witnessing higher demands for engaging content. Because of this, video content is becoming increasingly popular among businesses, marketers, and educators to inform, promote, entertain, and deliver value. That is why 95% of marketers believe that videos play a huge role in understanding and engaging with a product or service.

OTT or ‘Over-The-Top’ on the internet is a growing paradigm transforming and revolutionizing the traditional TV landscape, enabling interactive features, data, and targeted advertising. With OTT video media, users can access a whole new level of options in content and pricing on a range of applications and digital experience channels. There is an opportunity for marketers to develop dynamic, interactive, even "shoppable" advertising experiences to increase brand exposure and engagement and ultimately lead to increased sales.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how CrafterCMS leverages the full capabilities of its headless platform combined with AWS Media Services to deliver a variety of OTT video solutions.

Challenges With Video Content

For marketers today, video content serves a crucial role. According to the HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2021, video is now the most used format for content marketing. The same period witnessed an 80% year-on-year increase in media uploads. Viewers also spent over 12 billion minutes consuming video content. With all this on hand, you can see the astronomical potential benefits of using video content.

Despite these benefits, delivering video content can be challenging. With the rise in the popularity of video content, streaming channels are also on the rise. These channels now range from desktops to mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets, advertising boards, and IoT devices.

Handling video content storage and editing requirements is one thing, but delivering across different channels, locations, networks, formats (720P, 480P, 240P, 1080P, etc.), and bandwidth requirement is another.

For OTT video delivery, platforms need the capability of transcoding files to accommodate multiple file types, sizes, and bitrates. Most enterprises also prefer to have more security, searchability & personalization, analytics, and branding. Other features they may need include: Translation & transcription capabilities, digital rights management, clipping, and auto-tagging.

No matter the use case, headless video CMS solutions can simplify the storage and delivery of video content when built on the best infrastructure.

Everything You Need to Know About OTT Video Experiences

OTT is an acronym for ‘Over-the-Top’. The term refers to streaming video content over the public internet, instead of traditional (and expensive) broadcast media infrastructure. New media companies are increasingly joining the race for market dominance as traditional TV content is becoming more accessible online. In the same way as regular TV channels, users can consume streamed content over the Internet via mobile phones, smart TVs, and other devices.

OTT paved the way for video content to be made available across all digital channels. You don’t have to sit and watch TV in real-time as it was before. Now, you can view this content on tablets, phones, laptops, game consoles, advertising boards, and IoT devices.

Leverage The Power of a Headless CMS and AWS for OTT Video

Modern consumers have numerous options when viewing video content on streaming services across various devices such as mobile devices, desktops, and streaming services like Roku and Apple TV. To serve customers effectively across these channels, enterprises have to deliver content that doesn't compromise the customer experience. That means taking advantage of a headless CMS and the capabilities of AWS.

Importance of a Headless CMS For OTT

While a traditional video CMS might seem like a good option for OTT video -- live video & VOD, it doesn’t necessarily provide multi-platform content delivery. A headless video CMS provides a content-only backend that can serve different frontend technology frameworks such as React, React Native, Angular, Vue, iOS and/or Android. That means developers are not constrained to a single framework or tool to build and deliver engaging digital experiences.

CrafterCMS takes headless capabilities several steps further. Aside from the basic API-first capabilities of headless, CrafterCMS also provides additional capabilities and flexibility such as:

• Scalability: Instead of being constrained by the database-orientation of traditional video CMSs, CrafterCMS takes a serverless approach and therefore has the flexibility to elastically scale up and down as needed.
• Modern Video Standards: CrafterCMS enables you to define and utilize complex metadata models, and integrate them to deliver unique live streaming experiences. For example, it can deliver geofencing, geotargeting, and utilization of video source metadata (location, speed, direction, weather, audience reactions, etc.) into the video experience.
• Personalized Experiences: Developers can tailor & customize content to each user. For example, it can also help provide additional features such as location-based content delivery and deliver customized local content and translation capabilities.
• Easy Integrations: You can easily integrate with video players such as THEOplayer and Bitmovin (or use Crafter’s built-in open source player), analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, payment platforms like Stripe, and/or customer data platforms (CDPs) to help improve customer experience.

Read more on: Why You Might Need a Headless Video CMS

Deliver OTT Video With an AWS-Powered CMS

By leveraging the power of AWS, you gain access to a highly scalable cloud platform. AWS provides you with the elastic scalability necessary to manage and deliver video content. In addition, you can access a whole host of features that will offer you everything you need to enhance your digital experience. Some of these features include:

• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service: EKS is a “managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.” It also integrates with several other AWS services such as AWS Identity, AWS Access Management, and CloudWatch. EKS uses these services to offer applications a unified platform that allows for application scalability, monitoring, and load balancing.
• Amazon Elemental Media Services: Amazon Media Services provides a host of innovative features designed to create, transform, personalize, monetize, and deliver media services and sophisticated video processing & workflows in the cloud. In the same way, you can take advantage of Amazon Elemental Live to display live video content and 24/7 linear channels. With these services, you can deliver exceptional viewing experiences.
• Amazon AI/ML: AWS provides several AI/ML services for language translation, transcription, object recognition, and more. For example, CrafterCMS integrates with AWS Rekognition to deliver smart video experiences to a wide variety of audiences.

There are several other benefits to using AWS that are equally relevant to delivering OTT video content. In the same way, you can adapt and scale the storage and computing needs as you want. AWS' global reach and availability zones allow you for multiple regions.

Crafter Video: A Complete OTT Video Solution Powered By CrafterCMS and AWS

Crafter Video is an open source, pre-built OTT video solution built on top of its comprehensive headless CMS platform. It natively integrates with AWS to develop and deliver OTT video for live streaming and video-on-demand content. By utilizing AWS, you can enhance and scale video content across multiple channels. Other features you can access include AI/ML capabilities, speech and object recognition, and translation and transcription services.

With Crafter’s headless CMS platform and native AWS integrations, marketing teams can access easy-to-use features to create and manage video content. That means you can rapidly author and publish content independent of developer support. Meanwhile, development teams can enjoy seamless integration with their favorite front-end technologies of choice along with DevOps tools and processes. On top of that, you they benefit from the full benefits of a headless+ CMS with developer friendly capabilities with a sophisticated Git-based repository.

To learn more on how Crafter delivers exceptional video experiences, have a look at our white paper: Building OTT Video Experiences With Headless CMS and AWS.