Although content is still ‘King’, the side effect of Streaming Services aggressively rolling out content makes the connection between the ‘ideal’ content and consumer burdensome to initiate.
Streaming Services create a ‘funnel’ to get ‘ideal’ content to the consumer through the use of custom carousels and search.
5 minutes max, I stroll around the Streamers’ carousels for random movies or TV shows that catch my interest. If I don’t find anything worthy to commit my time, I bounce to another streaming service, and repeat the process.
The problem is compounded when you add broadcast Content Channels: ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, HBO, SyFy, USA, etc, in addition to Streamers like Amazon Instant and Netflix.
The cost of making a decision of which Movie/TV episode to watch comes down to a basic Microeconomic theory.
In order for the consumer to make an accurate assessment of Opportunity Cost, one has to consider ~ALL available options.
Therefore, the cost of making a decision is inefficient, and most importantly inaccurate due to the amount of Video On Demand, (VOD) repositories available to the consumer.
Opportunities to Curtail Consumer Search Time:
- On demand chat with a Genre Aficionado, video or text chat, 24/7, an employee of the Streaming Service, or central service contracted to the Service.
- More robust search that has the capacity to drill down on metadata. E.g. Filter: N stars rating; Sort: ‘added’ date,
- Add Closed Captioning to Search metadata
- Add object and facial recognition index of objects to Search; Open and Play media at time code. E.g. Nike Sneakers
- ‘Mad Libs’ style secondary search; fill in fields such as leading actor or actress, director of photography, etc.
- Inbox – recommendations ‘people’ have sent you, manual and automated messages. Queue up Search results to notify you once per week. User may send a message with a link to a movie.
- Cross Video On Demand (VOD) libraries Searching. Industry Standards derived and implemented.
