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The Evolution of OTT Content Curation and Discovery
May 28, 2025
The Evolution of OTT Content Curation and Discovery
As an OTT content creator, it's important to understand how your audience curates and discovers content. When you think about your viewers, picture them starting their journey, often not quite sure of what they want, by browsing through thumbnails or maybe searching for something specific. They might rely on your platform's recommendations, or they might explore trending sections to see what's popular. This initial phase is exploratory and is driven by a mix of instinct and the visual cues you provide. Your role is to make this process intuitive and guide them toward your content.
OTT Content Curation and Discovery
Active Participation
Once your audience finds something intriguing, they shift quickly from passive browsing to active curation, which means they start adding videos to a watchlist, creating playlists, or saving content for later. Some dive deeper to engage with features like mood-based filters or interactive quizzes that can suggest content tailored to what they enjoy overall or even just to their current vibe.
As a creator, you can tap into this by offering tools that empower them to personalize the experience. One great option is enabling users to tag content with custom labels or share playlists with friends, because that makes curation feel personal and makes them feel like they're part of the creation process.
Community and Feedback
Your audience doesn't curate in isolation; they're always influenced by the community around them. They discover content through social features, like seeing what their friends are watching, exploring user-generated recommendations, or even plain, old-fashioned asking what their social circle recommends!
You can harness all this by integrating social tools that amplify peer-driven discovery and offer easy ways for viewers to share what they like. Shareable playlists or live chat during streams give you the chance to grab this natural human tendency and make it work for you.
Data Insights
As your audience curates and discovers content on your OTT platform, they always leave behind a trail of data that's invaluable for you as a content creator. They're clicking on certain genres, lingering on specific thumbnails, or skipping others entirely. They might watch an entire music video series in one sitting, or abandon a documentary halfway through.
If you have the capability to analyze all these behaviors, you can find out what captivates them and capitalize on it yourself. For example, if you notice your fans frequently rewatch live performance clips, that tells you it might be worth your while to produce more concert-style content.
Repeat Engagement
Your audience's curation journey should definitely not end with a single session. It needs to become an ongoing cycle of discovery and return because they trust your platform to deliver fresh, relevant content. To keep them engaged, introduce features like personalized notifications that alert them to new releases from creators they love or recommend content based on their recent activity.
For more on how to tap into the date your users are creating and build a platform that resonates, contact us at Lightcast.com now for a free demo.
