Despite the hype around AVoD, Faultline has always maintained that the business model makes no sense long-term, especially if the platform in question is eyeing up premium content. So, it is reassuring to hear that a secretly huge OSS/BSS provider for the video industry is already having conversations with these platforms to set up subscription revenue streams.
Evergent’s latest update to its Customer Care and Billing (CCB) product suite promises a range of monetization strategies across AVoD, SVoD and TVoD (transactional VoD). The company’s CEO, Vijay Sajja, told us that this is often a case of ad-supported streamers bringing in new monetization opportunities.
Sajja recalled how, five years ago, Sony’s OTT service in India (SonyLIV) was almost entirely AVoD and still one of the country’s top five streaming platforms, largely due to an impressive schedule of live sport. Once Sony realized there were grounds for a serious business, it recruited Evergent as its revenue platform, launching both SVoD and TVoD income streams for what is now a hybrid OTT service.
“It had trouble making enough money just through AVoD, but now there seems to be pure-play AVoD guys making the model work because ad technologies have matured. You can now provide tangible results for advertisers,” Sajja argued.
As for whether these pure-play AVoD players – think Pluto TV, Tubi, Crackle Plus – would ditch the hype and step into SVoD or TVoD, Sajja seemed open minded, and for good reason. “We are always talking to them, and even those guys are now looking for other forms of monetization,” he told us.
As one of the companies trying to make heads and tails of fragmenting video service operations and billing systems, Evergent seems well placed to make that call.
Faultline’s sister research arm, Rethink TV, tried to tackle this mess in our Customer Journey Management forecast at the tail-end of last year, but Evergent was one company that slipped through the net. It has a huge footprint and top tier operators as clients, but it is still struggling to grapple with the fact that no-one apart from its customers knows its name.
One reason is that constructing back-end infrastructure for operators rarely makes headlines within media and entertainment, so gray is the subject compared to the content that it enables. “It’s not sexy, but it allows you to do sexy things,” as Vijay Sajja, CEO of Evergent, put it.
Sajja spoke of the age-old problem operators face when tweaking and streamlining OSS/BSS systems, noting that the US cable business grew via consolidation, and therefore the winners ended up with four or five billing systems operating simultaneously. This internally siloed fragmentation caused major issues for operators when they tried to offer flexible new bundles and promotional deals.
But it seemed most of the offerings that Sajja was keen to talk about were more operator related, specifically tools that allow the quick deployment of new promotional packages to cut churn and onboard more subscribers.
In terms of onboarding subs, Evergent’s toolbox seems to have dressed up lots of different offerings which essentially come down to bundling content, CPE and services in different combinations. While we argued that this was hardly a showstopping pitch of cutting-edge solutions for operators, Sajja was adamant that the tried and tested tricks still work, noting how flexible the approach is across the globe – bundling Diwali themed movies in India around the festive season, for example.
But Sajja was keen for us to not pigeon-hole Evergent as a one-trick pony. The company has impressive datasets made from the 650 million users that have been onboarded onto its systems, which can be used to keep current client’s subscribers from churning away. Evergent’s own datasets on subscribers coming and going can be integrated with a client’s content consumption data to give a full picture for predicting unhappy shoppers.
Promotions and offers can then be pushed to these potential churners, with some channels of communication more unusual than you may think. One spooky project required the Google Assistant to listen to what the customer is watching, sending push notifications on relevant content to upgrade to 4K for a one-time fee.
While much of Evergent’s offering sounds indiscernible from its older competitors – Amdocs, CSG International, Netcracker, to name a few – Sajja argues that age is not everything, and that Evergent’s late arrival has been a blessing. “They are all good companies, but we are more agile and nimble. We built our platform to outperform these guys,” he argued.
For Evergent, flexibility and maneuverability for both operators and end consumers seem to be the guiding principles. This means quick time to market for new promotional strategies and bundles, and cloud-based, modular services that can easily be slipped into an operator’s existing infrastructure.
Sajja explained how this was learnt the hard way. When Evergent first went to market with an end-to-end OSS/BSS system in the mid-2000s, it had little luck. “No one would pull the trigger on these huge systems,” he recalled.
So, the company looked to the emerging range of OTT platforms for its first clients. Netflix was only just launching at the time, and one of Evergent’s first clients was Total Movie, a pioneering Mexican-owned streamer that was looking to get a head start on Netflix in the Latin American market. We all know how that went – Sajja says Total Movie did not have the necessary tarmac to fight it out, but described it as a valuable experience in quickly scaling across continents.
When counting by clients, Evergent’s business is currently split about 50-50 between operators and direct-to-consumer (D2C) video service providers, although the operators take up a larger proportion of the company’s revenues.
D2C is the hotter topic now, and often the undertakings are far more widespread. Sajja noted that these are the first video services that can easily launch across the globe simultaneously, with many D2C platforms from content studios often launching in multiple markets.
As for whether D2C was just a flash in the pan, with further aggregation of these services inevitable down the line, Sajja felt that consumers will always look for ease of use and ease of purchasing. “It’s just like how water will always find a way to go downwards,” he said. “Some consolidation will happen, but our tool allows these services to operate either way.”