Fire TV Search and Store Placement for Channels on an OTT Platform

Fire TV Search and Store Placement for Channels on an OTT Platform

You can build a really handsome app and still watch it sit unused if Amazon's index never learns what you carry. Today, most people type in a title, speak a name, or just skim a homescreen: they rarely open an unknown icon and hunt around. That means the process of finding you has to start outside your player.

Universal Search and Browse is the mechanism that surfaces your titles even when the viewer has not installed your app. The way it works is that your catalog file gets ingested into Amazon's index so it can appear in global results and in “ways to watch” on a detail page. But ultimately, the matching depends on how much unambiguous data you include.

A title alone isn't good enough, but if you include a release date, run length, episode number, and an external identifier, such as an IMDb ID, you greatly raise the chance that Amazon will treat your item as the same work another service already carries, which consolidates the result instead of burying it as a duplicate.

How to Go About It

Index Carefully

Amazon expects a unique ID for every work and expects that ID to stay the same across updates. If an ID vanishes from an upload, the work will just drop from the index. If you later restore the work under a new ID, all your earlier matching will be lost, and the catalog might even get suspended. Keep one scheme from the first file you send and never rewrite it.

Prioritize

Prioritize what belongs in that file you send to Amazon. Short clips under ten minutes are not ingested at all, while stale news and other items that no longer serve searchers can dilute the catalog and make you seem irrelevant to the algorithm.

New uploads are not instant, either, and content can take up to fourteen hours to appear after a successful ingest. If you've got an item you want to be available on a certain date for a premiere, don't assume a last-minute file will get it up in time. Send it early and use availability dates.

Describe it Right

Search is only half of placement. The other half is the store listing itself, and that includes the display title, a short description, a longer description, feature bullets, keywords, the category, and images. Keywords influence text search on the retail site and on the device, and they also help with voice queries when a spoken name doesn't exactly match the title.

If you want all your files, listings, apps, and linear schedules handled in one system rather than stitched together after the fact, request a demo from Lightcast.com today and see how we can help you build your content brand.