Product Feature - Regions and Localisation

One of the great advantages of OTT is the ability to expand beyond the confines of your home market. The upsides are obvious: easy access to a larger, global audience willing to not only pay for your new content, but also able to access an entire backlog of previously unseen content.

Our App Platform makes unlocking this global audience simple. However, that doesn’t come without drawbacks. Think of rights issues, localisation, and languages, all key to the success of your services. For a global service, for instance, there is nothing worse than being forced to only present one language to an international audience. One of the App Platform’s modules is dedicated to localising languages per region, from German to French to Hindi, just to pick a handful of examples.

This functionality extends to custom title-cards and carousels, making sure you’re putting your best foot forward in each region, accommodating what is known as ‘glocalisation’, a neologism used to describe a product or service that is developed and distributed globally but is also adjusted to accommodate the user or consumer in a local market. That’s not all: end-users can also set their own language options in the settings menu, so that they can enjoy content in whatever setting they find most natural.

The second major functionality of our Region feature helps to tackle legal concerns. Whether most first party content is likely free to operate with, a lot of second party content may be region locked as part of a specific rights deal. This may also involve only having distribution rights in Europe, or even more granular like a specific country.

Our App Platform was designed with these potential scenarios in mind. Using the Region module, operators can lock content to specific regions, so that it will be automatically removed from the results outside allotted territories. This ‘blacked-out’ content will also be removed from carousels displayed across the applications, so important screen space isn’t taken up by content users can’t actually access in their region.

Going global is one of the great benefits of OTT but it can be an intricate process for any organisation, especially when stepping into the digital realm for the first time. At Simplestream, we work daily to simplify these processes, so that operators can step into the digital revolution that’s now well underway, and make the most of it.