OTT Content Security: The Pros, Cons, and Practicalities of Limiting Concurrent Streams
Most video streaming services take steps to prevent password sharing by limiting the number of devices each account can register and use, or by restricting the number of concurrent streams that can be started using the same credentials. For many OTT services, concurrent stream limits (CSLs) are a fundamental requirement of their content licensing agreements. Their challenge is to balance user experience with enforcement of the agreed restrictions. Beyond compliance, CSLs can also be a powerful tool for protecting revenue, managing costs, and even unlocking new business opportunities. Done wrong, they can frustrate users and drive churn. Done right, they reduce password sharing, safeguard platform performance, and even create upselling opportunities for premium subscriptions.
In this blog, I’ll explore the strategic and technical implications of concurrent stream limits in OTT services with SVOD, AVOD and hybrid business models. And I’ll look at how a thoughtful, holistic approach can help your OTT business thrive while keeping both users and rights holders happy.
Limiting concurrent streams is just one of the content and platform security measures outlined in our free OTT security e-guide, “Safeguarding Your Content & Platform.” Download it now to learn about DRM, Geo-blocking, VPN and Proxy Detection, Parental Controls, Data Protection, Platform Protection and more.
The Why: The Case For Limiting Concurrent Streams in OTT
Let’s start by looking at the benefits of streaming limits, beyond the simple reason that the rights-holders insist on it to prevent password sharing and piracy. Without any CSL, sharing passwords between friends – or even with strangers on a public forum – is easy. That’s bad news from a piracy perspective but also for performance. When tens of thousands of users hit your platform simultaneously, you’d better be ready to handle that traffic or your paying customers will suffer from long start-up times, stream-drop-outs, slow authentication, and service lag that will damage your reputation and drive up your churn. This is especially true if you’re offering live events or premium sports. In these cases, using CSLs can be a proactive step towards safeguarding performance and protecting user satisfaction with your service.
There’s also a cost implication to multiple users accessing the content at the same time. Variable platform fees – such as CDN delivery costs and per-license DRM rates – can very quickly add up, a phenomenon known as “bandwidth draining”.
The Why Not: Challenges Created by OTT Concurrent Stream Restrictions
Of course, there are downsides to limiting the number of streams a user account can access at once. The biggest of these is user experience. If you live in a multi-person household, it’s quite normal to expect that two people might access the same content (or different pieces of content from the same OTT provider) on different devices at the same time. Perhaps your teenagers prefer to watch on a tablet in their bedrooms rather than share the sofa with their parents. Perhaps your partner wants to watch a TV series while you relax with a movie. Hard and fast limits can make for a frustrating experience, and it’s essential that you find an adequate way to explain and signpost these restrictions to users, both at the moment of purchasing a subscription AND at the point where the limit is reached or breached.
Some operators (for example, Netflix, Amazon Prime) choose a “first man standing” approach, which means the first person to start their stream gets to keep watching, and others who come along later from the same account will be prevented from starting a subsequent stream. Other streaming platforms (for example, Spotify and Amazon Music) prefer the “last man standing” strategy, which means that when your teen presses play in their bedroom, there’s a good chance you’ll abruptly lose access.
Not only do both scenarios quite likely lead to raised voices, they limit the potential for your service to be used to its full potential in each household. We all know that, for SVOD services in particular, the more use your app gets, the less likely it is to be on the churn list when household finances are reviewed. For the record, Magine Pro’s OTT platform enables our customers to work on a “first man standing” basis when limiting streams.
Enforcing concurrency restrictions isn’t just a UX challenge. It also adds a layer of additional technical complexity and load into your apps. Regular checks need to be made for each active stream to confirm that no other stream start has been attempted on another device. The closer together the checks, the shorter the window in which users may get illicit access to multiple streams. However, there’s a trade-off between enforcement and the additional backend load these checks create, which could create unwanted latency, particularly for large-scale live events.
We’ve seen checks taking place as far apart as every 30 seconds, but typically recommend one check per 10 seconds. Once again, you’ll need to ensure your platform has the performance to carry out all these checks without degrading the user experience. A well-optimized system balances security with performance efficiency, ensuring minimal disruption to legitimate users while keeping unauthorized access in check.
The How: How to Implement Stream Limits Effectively
So, what is standard practice for limiting access? For perhaps the past ten years, the most common approach we’ve seen our customers use, influenced by the Apple iTunes store, is to limit users to two concurrent streams AND a maximum of five registered devices. If the user wants to start using a sixth device (perhaps because someone in the household has a new phone or TV) then they’ll need to de-register an existing one. This is typically done via the OTT service’s web app.
One way to mitigate frustration created by such limits is to ensure the UX for managing your registered devices is intuitive, reducing friction while maintaining security. It’s also important that your customer service team has access to a portal they can use to help users who’ve reached their limit. For example, the Magine Pro Console gives OTT services the ability to look up all the devices registered to an individual subscriber and reset registrations where necessary.
Below is an example of how consumers manage their registered devices on the website of our customer’s service, using the Magine Pro OTT Platform’s APIs to set and enforce the restrictions across multiple devices.
While big streaming services like Netflix continue to refer to their packages as limiting the number of “devices” a customer can use, the reality is that the restriction is on concurrent streams. You can login to as many individual TVs, phones and tablets as you like with one set of credentials, but you’ll only be able to watch one, two or four streams at once, depending on your subscription package.
The When: Targeting Concurrent Stream Limits To Content
Most SVOD services enforce a blanket CVL policy across their whole service. You can watch any two assets concurrently – including the same asset on two devices at the same time. However, things become a little more complex when there are live events (especially sport), AVOD or a combination of business models in the mix. This is where you want an OTT platform that allows you to be more granular with applying CVLs.
For ad-funded content, it makes less sense to limit concurrent streams – the more views, the more money you make from advertising. If you’re combining AVOD and SVOD, you will want the ability to mix and match restrictions across content with different business models. Equally, we’ve seen an increase in sports rights holders mandating just one concurrent stream per user for high-profile live events. If your streaming service includes live sports streams, or rebroadcasts TV channels with such rights, then you’ll need the ability to enforce these tighter controls on a per-asset basis. Look for an OTT Platform that gives you the flexibility to take this kind of holistic approach.
Concurrent Stream Limits can also be a business opportunity. Major platforms like Netflix and Disney+ have already proven that consumers are willing to pay for more concurrent streams. In fact, Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing, accompanied by the introduction of a ‘paid sharing’ model, has resulted in millions of new paying subscribers. For smaller OTT services, adopting a similar approach could be a strategic revenue driver (where licensing agreements allow): upselling premium plans, offering family packages, or bundling additional streams with other perks (such as ad-free viewing) can increase ARPU while keeping users engaged.
If, however, your research suggests such premium tiers would not be successful in your target market, there are alternatives. If you own your own content or have relatively liberal licensing agreements and can afford to offer all your users more than the average number of concurrent streams, then this may also be a great way to differentiate your service from the competition.
The Rest: Combining CSLs with Other Security Measures
If you want to know more about how Magine Pro can help you safeguard your content and your OTT platform, download our free security e-guide. It’s got valuable insights on how to blend CSLs with other measures such as DRM, Geo-blocking, VPN and Proxy Detection, Parental Controls, Data Protection, and protections for your platform against malicious intrusion.
Download the e-guide here
The Future of Data-Driven Streaming: Overlooked Metrics That Could Unlock OTT Growth
With fierce competition driving annual churn rates as high as 47%, the streaming industry cannot afford to overlook any data-driven insights that could move the needle towards profitability. Success depends on understanding the metrics that power audience engagement, optimise content strategy, and drive revenue growth. While many OTT services rely on standard data points, some critical statistics remain overlooked. Could they provide the competitive edge that’s needed in a crowded market?
In this article, I’ll explore the key analytics every streaming service should monitor, highlight some underutilised data points that can transform decision-making, and explain why a flexible platform for data exports is essential for scaling your service.
Key Metrics Every Streaming Service Monitors
To start, let’s review the foundational statistics that most OTT services already track. These form the backbone of operational and strategic decisions:
1. Audience. Examples include:
- Daily and Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): Track the size and consistency of your audience over time. This helps identify growth trends and gauge user loyalty.
- Device Usage: Understand how users access your service—whether via mobile, smart TVs, or desktops—to optimise experiences for the most popular platforms.
2. Engagement. Examples include:
- Hours Watched per User per Day/Time of Day: Understand how engaged your audience is and which content drives the most consumption. Essential for giving users the right content recommendations at the right time.
- Completion Rates: Measure the percentage of content viewed to determine if your audience finishes episodes or movies. This is particularly vital for identifying binge-worthy content and optimising recommendations.
3. Funnel. Examples include:
- Trial-to-Subscriber Conversion Rate: Analyse how many free-trial users convert into paying subscribers.
- Churn Rate: Track the percentage of subscribers who leave your service to refine retention strategies.
4. Quality of Service (QoS) & Quality of Experience (QoE). Examples include:
- Buffering Percentage: Identify issues impacting playback performance.
- Video Startup Time: Ensure your service meets customer expectations for seamless streaming.
- Playback success/Failure: Get early warning of issues that are preventing users from enjoying the content they’ve chosen. This is commonly monitored along with the rate of exits before the video starts (EBVS).
These data points are all critical for day-to-day operations but often represent only the tip of the iceberg.
Neglected Metrics That Could Transform OTT Growth
Here are some commonly overlooked areas to analyse. You may find they offer insights that unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation:
- Behavioural Profiling Through User Profiles
The ability to segment the user experience for different people within a single household account has grown in popularity in line with the growth of both personalised recommendations and the viewing of OTT content on the big screen. Of course, it’s not used by everyone – our experience suggests fewer than 40% of accounts have profiles enabled – but OTT service providers can still make great use of the data these profiles offer. Analysing individual viewing habits more effectively is essential to offering personalised recommendations that are proven to increase engagement and user satisfaction. If you’re still measuring usage only at the household level, you’re missing out. - Catalogue Rotation and Content Discovery
Many streaming services find that 90% of views come from just 10% of their catalogue. While it’s good to know your top performers so you can promote them to more users, it’s important to also track the underutilised content. This data is useful for influencing your future licensing and in-house production decisions, but there’s more that you can do than just drop the poorly performing content. Perhaps the problem isn’t the content but the way you’re promoting it? New graphics or enhanced metadata could be what’s needed to make these unsung gems come to life. You could also consider giving some of the lower-performing assets a boost with some homepage promotion? Or make use of a feature like Magine Pro’s “random” setting which shuffles all the selected assets in a specific collection every 24 hours to keep rails looking fresh. These measures could improve your return on investment for content you’ve already invested in. - Recovered Customers
Most OTT services rightly place massive priority on their churn rate but how closely are you watching the saved subscriptions – those that were on the verge of cancelling but were recovered via promotional offers or reactivation campaigns? Tracking this data can provide a wealth of insights into what is driving the effectiveness of retention strategies and identify opportunities to refine outreach efforts. To really make the best of this data, you’ll need to ensure your user flows capture user feedback on why they’re planning to cancel as well as the measure that persuaded them to stay. - Return on Investment (ROI) by Content Group
Measuring hours watched per content item is valuable. But the true insight comes from correlating that data directly with the relative cost of licensing or producing the content. If cheaper content is driving half as many viewing hours as a flagship drama show, but costs a third as much to make or license, then it could actually be considered your star performer. Getting streaming data and rights data together in one platform drives smarter acquisition decisions. This can help prioritise investments that maximise viewer engagement and revenue.
The Value of Data Exports and Custom Dashboards
If you’re the size of Disney+ or Netflix, you’re almost certainly monitoring all these metrics and more already. For smaller streaming services, however, it’s much harder to be across all the data and take appropriate action. To act on these types of insights, it’s essential to have the right business intelligence tools.
The standard analytics dashboard offered in most streaming platforms can provide an overview, but for truly data-driven growth, you need the ability to customise your analysis and develop your own dashboards.
That’s why we’ve architected the Magine Pro OTT platform so it’s easy to integrate user data with tools you already use, like Tableau or Power BI, empowering your team to make smarter decisions. By creating custom dashboards, you can align your analysis with your specific business goals. For example, tracking engagement trends by region can inform localised content strategies.
Ready to take your streaming data to the next level?
The metrics you monitor today shape the future of your OTT service. By keeping track of some of the commonly neglected data points as well as the foundational ones, you can create a more engaging, efficient, and profitable platform.
Don’t let overlooked metrics hold back your OTT growth. Contact Magine Pro today to see how our flexible tools can help you unlock your platform’s full potential.
Don’t Panic! A stress-free guide to upgrading your OTT service
No video service makes the decision to switch OTT platform lightly, but moving to get Smart TV apps, better UX and better monetisation options doesn’t have to be a nightmare. In recent blog posts, we’ve looked at the streaming trends that are driving OTT services to consider moving technology platforms, as well as some of the key challenges they face when making a switch. In this post, our Head of Engineering and Operations, Marcus Linden, provides an insight into what a migration process looks like, and what the video service can do to make it go as smoothly and quickly as possible.
“We’re going to need a bigger boat!” When you’ve outgrown your OTT platform
You probably chose your current all-in-one platform so you could concentrate on content and outsource the many complexities of going OTT to a team of experts. Smart move! You didn’t need to hire your own specialists in UX design, app development, billing, integrations, transcoding etc. But a few years in, you’re starting to feel like you’ve outgrown your existing provider. You want Big Screen apps, flexible monetisation options and a higher-quality UX, but for that – to quote the movie Jaws – “going to need a bigger boat”!
We’ve helped a number of OTT services make the switch to the Magine Pro platform to get all these benefits, and we know that it can be a daunting decision. You’re not just swapping out a single app, billing solution or transcoding tool – you’re switching pretty much everything all at once. And you’re probably in a hurry to make it happen as soon as possible. The good news is that, unlike hunting for Jaws, migrating OTT platforms doesn’t have to be terrifying!
Here’s what we’ve learned from guiding other services through the switch, helping them to move over as quickly as possible, with minimal disruption to both end users and their internal operations.
Ready, Set, Go! What you need in place to make switching fast and fuss free
The work to get a customer switched over to the Magine Pro platform can take as little as two weeks, with daily check-ins between a representative of the customer’s organisation and our customer success team. But to achieve such an expedited timeline, the customer needs to be fully prepared to supply all the necessary information and ensure they have team members who are accountable for key areas of the migration.
How to get your content into your new OTT platform
In our experience, the task that takes up the most time when moving platforms is moving the content itself, including video, metadata and images. So, you’ll want to get started on this process as soon as possible.
When it comes to video, as I described in my previous blog post, you can either ingest the source files for all your existing content, or you can move over the existing DRM-encrypted files. Our advice is to go back to the high-quality source files. It may seem counterintuitive if you’ve already transcoded the content, but every platform has its preferred formats and this is a great opportunity to normalise all your content which may have been uploaded at different times and rendered into different bit-rates. While uploading source files to cloud storage does take time, it’s typically no more time-intensive than uploading all the different renditions of the same file. We advise our customers to use automation to smooth the batch-upload process, rather than requiring someone to supervise manual uploads. Having some scripting skills on hand to support this, even just for a few weeks, will likely increase the velocity of your move to your new platform.
Metadata is the new oil: Maximising discoverability in your new OTT platform
It is crucial that any video service takes the time to get the metadata transfer right when switching to a new OTT platform. In many cases, the existing system is the “source of truth” for all your content metadata, but it’s not always – perhaps you’ve got a separate rights management system that you’ll be exporting from. But wherever you hold your metadata, you’re going to need to ensure it maps accurately to the fields in your new platform. Again, you’ll want to automate this process and we’re often called upon to help our customers with the technicalities of this data transformation.
Trading Up Your OTT User Experience: Big Screen and Small Screen Apps
Although an end-to-end OTT platform relieves you of the responsibility for designing your own apps, there is still a need for some design input from the video service provider. Logos and other image assets need to be provided, including images for the App splash screens. In return, you’ll also need to upload images of the refreshed Apps to the various app stores to promote your service. So while you probably won’t need a designer on your staff to smooth the project along, we do recommend you have someone on the project team who is responsible for sourcing and signing-off the necessary designs and imagery.
Once the apps are ready, we’ll typically push them into the customer’s app store accounts (you’ll need to supply the credentials) but it’s up to the customer to do final testing and actually submit the apps for review and publication.
When it comes to TV apps for the likes of LG or Samsung, you probably already know that the review process is typically much more lengthy than with Google or Apple. If you’re switching platforms to get access to big screen apps for the first time, you can afford to make the jump for all your other apps and wait for the Smart TV app approvals to come through at a later date. If you have existing apps, the approvals process is something you’ll need to take into account when planning your switch-over date. But if you’re working with a partner like Magine Pro who has already published many apps for companies like LG and Samsung, it can be helpful to highlight to them that the apps you’re submitting for review are using exactly the same code-base as other apps they’ve already approved.
Getting to know you: Switching your customers to the new platform
While the high-volume migration of content is happening in the background, and your apps are being approved, another topic to focus on is customer data. The first step is to provide examples of the user details held in your current platform to the new service provider so they can start to match fields and identify any issues.
If, as outlined in my previous blog, you’re bringing over customer accounts but not passwords, a key step is to craft in advance the template emails that will go out to existing users to inform them that they need to create a new password when they log in for the first time after the switch-over. Getting these communications right is key to limiting user friction and the potential for churn during the migration process. At the same time, you’ll also need to configure template emails for all those business-as-usual customer flows such as reset password, payment processed, payment card expired, etc.
Automating the migration of customer data and user accounts between OTT platforms
When you’re ready to switch the users over, automation is once again going to be your friend. Ideally, you’ll have someone on your team with scripting skills and a working knowledge of your existing CRM/billing system. They’ll need to obtain the necessary customer data from your current platform so it can be safely added to your new platform via our migration team to:
- Create a user in the new platform with all relevant information – first name, last name, email address, birth date, location etc. The list will differ per platform.
- Create relevant entitlements for that user that map to their existing entitlements
- Add details of when their next billing cycle is required
On the day nerves: How to handle the actual switchover?
We typically recommend that customers time their switch-over to coincide with the regularly scheduled maintenance window of our cloud provider to ensure all back-ups are clean and in sync. We’ve already touched on the need to migrate the user accounts, but how do you stop any customer purchases or registrations falling through the net while that is going on? Our advice is to pause new sign-ups and purchases just before you take your image of the user database to avoid this problem.
Using automation will minimise the length of time when you’re unable to support customer interactions in this way, in our benchmarking tests, we expect it to take around two hours to migrate 10,000 user accounts, so it should be possible to do this process at a time of day when your service sees the least user traffic.
But in some cases, the existing OTT platform may not be able to disable sign-ups or purchases, so we’ll need to do a careful reconciliation of the delta between exported data and final data in the decommissioned system to avoid customer complaints.
Want to know more? Talk to our experts
As you can see, there’s a lot more to switching OTT platforms than meets the eye, but if you’ve got the right support and a team that’s done it many times before, you’re in safe hands. If you’d like to talk to the Magine Pro team about any of the topics raised in this blog, why not book a meeting.
The Top Five Challenges When Migrating OTT Platforms: What You Need to Know
As the OTT market matures, we’re hearing from more and more video streaming services who are looking to switch technology platforms. In some cases, they want more features than their current provider can offer: capabilities like personalization, big screen apps, support for hybrid revenue streams, and improved platform autoscaling to deal with peaks of user demand. In other cases, they’re looking for the efficiency and savings in terms of costs and development time that come with moving to an end-to-end OTT platform from a home-grown solution or a combination of multiple vendors.
Whatever your reason for considering a migration away from an existing OTT platform, it’s not a decision any service takes lightly. Like moving home, fear of the complications and challenges involved in a migration can lead streaming services to put off making a change until their current home becomes absolutely intolerable. But while moving providers can be challenging, it doesn’t have to be stressful. It’s a process we’ve guided a number of our customers through. In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the key considerations that you should take into account before embarking on a migration.
1. Migrating your video content to a new OTT platform
You’ve invested time and money in building a content library and optimising it to engage your audience. You’ll need to efficiently move video assets, associated images and metadata into your new OTT platform. Don’t forget this includes rights and availability information for each asset and any editorially-generated data such as thematic collections.
If you still have the source video files, you can ingest these directly into your new platform for re-transcode and wrapping with fresh DRM. There may be costs involved, but it can be worth it to get the correct video renditions for all the consumer devices you’ll now be targeting. For example, it’s much better to go back to the high-resolution source and create better-quality assets for new big-screen apps.
If you can’t access the original source content, or you’ve already created multi-bitrate files in all the sizes you need, it’s possible for your new platform provider to exchange encryption keys with your existing platform and re-use your current files. However, this requires timely cooperation from your outgoing vendor, which cannot always be guaranteed.
As well as migrating content, you’ll want to think about when to stop ingesting new assets into the old platform. It’s common to run both systems in parallel for a short time to ensure a smooth transition, but this is likely to create extra work for your editorial team, so it’s important to minimise the dual-running period where possible.
2. Transitioning subscription plans from an existing OTT platform
In addition to the content itself, you’ll need to go through a mapping process to make sure the subscription plans your customers enjoy today are still available when you’ve moved to your new technology platform. Keep naming and content selection exactly the same to avoid confusing customers during the transition and damaging your brand reputation.
If one of the reasons you’re migrating is to take advantage of new business models such as AVOD or TVOD alongside your subscription packages, it’s important to think carefully about how these will co-exist. You will also want to plan how you will communicate the migration and the new offerings to existing customers.
If you’d like to know more about implementing hybrid business models in your OTT service, I’d recommend you read our new e-guide: The Essentials of OTT Monetization our our advanced white paper, The Profit Playbook: Proven OTT Revenue Growth Tactics.
3. Moving users to a new OTT platform without creating friction and driving churn
One of the areas that most concerns OTT services is the friction that will be created for users in any platform switch. It’s sensible to consider the potential for churn and that’s why we suggest doing everything to avoid making customers re-register. One option is to migrate all their data, including passwords. This is the most seamless approach for users but there are security implications. Another option is to migrate all the other data, but ask them to create a new password at their first login via the new platform.
As well as granting access, user accounts must also be transitioned with all the relevant entitlements under their existing subscriptions. Making sure they’re mapped accurately is essential to avoiding customer complaints. Depending on the vendor of the OTT platform, the entitlements may be more or less tightly coupled to the individual video assets. This is something to consider carefully in parallel to the content migration questions we looked at earlier in this blog.
4. Preventing payment method errors in an OTT platform migration
The natural extension of concerns about migrating user accounts is the worry about friction around payment methods. It’s a particular problem for SVOD services that rely on stored card details to process monthly or annual subscription transactions. The more seamless the migration for the user, the less likely it is that consumers will simply not bother to take the steps required to maintain their subscription.
The process of migrating stored credit/debit card details will be easier if you’re using the same payment provider despite moving to a different streaming platform. But it can also be managed smoothly between different payment providers with sufficient notice and cooperation. Again, it’s worth looking at the advanced strategies outlined in our white paper, The Profit Playbook, especially the section on subscription dunning and win-back campaigns.
5. Seamlessly switching users to new versions of your streaming apps
While many OTT services switch platforms to unlock access via a wider range of consumer devices, including Smart TVs, it’s also important to consider how you migrate users from existing apps.
With Android apps hosted in Google Play or iOS apps via or Apple’s App Store, it’s a relatively simple process. Once the app versions from the new provider are ready to be published, they can be uploaded to the store with the same app ID as your existing apps, so the users get the new app whenever they next do a manual or auto app update. This generally requires minimal interaction with Apple or Google and little to no delay.
If you’ve got existing big screen apps, however, you’ll face a longer approval process. So, it’s important to start the dialogue with TV manufacturers like Samsung and LG as early as possible so you can work closely with them on managing the approvals and publication process. Working with an established big screen app developer is a good way to reduce the time involved in this transition.
For more on the process of developing, publishing, and maintaining big screen apps, download our whitepaper, Go Big Or Stay Small.
The path to progress – milestones for migrating your OTT service
So now we know the key challenges involved in migrating your OTT service. In an upcoming blog, we’ll look at how Magine Pro manages the milestones in a typical customer migration project to ensure the smoothest possible experience for viewers and content managers alike. Follow us on LinkedIn to be updated when the blog is published.
Want to know more?
If you’d like to talk to Magine Pro’s experts about migrating your OTT service away from your current vendor, why not book a meeting.