Discoverability As The New Differentiator

Content Creators Are Partnering With Smart TV OEMs To Keep Themselves Front And Center

The companies that succeed in the next era of streaming will be the ones that master the art of discoverability in our increasingly fragmented digital entertainment ecosystem.

The streaming industry is in its maturation phase, and with that maturity comes a deluge of content and entertainment access points for consumers. Membership numbers have plateaued yet content production costs remain sky-high, with many streaming services spending billions of dollars per year on original films and series. Meanwhile, the competition has never been more stiff — TV networks and film studios have created owned and operated streaming services, giving them control over both content and distribution, and large tech platforms continue to invest heavily in their streaming offerings.

This is an important point of consideration for consumers, who have an enormous (and ever-growing) library of on-demand films, series, free live channels, news networks and gaming platforms at their fingertips. It’s created a distinctly modern problem: not being able to decide what to watch.

Anyone who watches connected television is intimately familiar with the challenge. You sit down in front of your smart TV with every intention of watching some entertaining video content, but instead spend an inordinate amount of time browsing through your various CTV apps, unable to commit to a title.

There is so much premium quality available that according to the Nielsen Total Audience Report, 33% of respondents (1 out of 3 people) don’t know what they want to watch when they turn on their TVs."

This inability to choose is a psychological phenomenon known as the paradox of choice. Logic would seem to dictate that the more options you provide a consumer, the better. But past a certain point, burdensome. When the number of choices is virtually infinite, consumers may feel overwhelmed and enter a state of mental paralysis, unable to make a decision at all.

Viewers don’t always want to be inundated with connected TV options — what they want is a curated selection that allows them to efficiently assess and access content they’re predisposed to like. Which is why discoverability is one of the single most important aspects of the CTV industry going forward, and a point at which content creators can work to differentiate themselves.

Matching a consumer with a piece of content is, on its own, incredibly nuanced. While over 2,000 different CTV apps are available to download on a Samsung Smart TV, the average Samsung TV owner uses only four CTV apps in a quarter. Cutting through the noise is a tall order.

Ad targeting has made this discovery process smarter, more targeted and more effective, especially when users are in the discovery phase. If a streaming service can serve consumers a targeted message during that discovery phase, it increases the consumer’s viewing time by 64 percent.

With targeted advertising, streaming providers can identify the consumers most likely to enjoy the new title they spent so much money producing, and drive those consumers to watch the program.

For consumers, targeted ads provide a welcome relief from the paradox of choice, allowing them to make a viewing decision more quickly. For streaming services, targeted ads are an effective means for driving subscriptions, discoverability, improving retention and delivering a solid ROI on production costs.

Streaming providers face a host of challenges as the streaming market matures. Competition is fierce, churn is high (some services experience churn rates as high as 50 percent, according to Samsung Automatic Content Recognition/ACR data), the cost of consumer acquisition is high and streamers still need to spend lots of money on production to supply their platforms with a steady stream of new content.

For years, streaming services thought the answer to these challenges was to simply create more content, but that alone doesn’t solve the problem. The final frontier in streaming is discoverability.

The companies that master the art of discoverability will not only solve a problem for consumers, they will create new opportunities for advertisers to participate in the content curation process.