Make the Most of the Summer Slowdown: 5 Ways to Optimise Your Streaming Service
While summer doesn’t bring everything to a halt, it often creates just enough breathing room to focus on improvements that tend to get sidelined during busier periods. For streaming operators, it’s a valuable window to refine your platform, boost subscriber engagement, and prepare for the busier autumn and winter months when streaming activity typically climbs.
In this blog, we’re sharing a few practical, quick-win optimisations you can implement now – no heavy development required. Here are five areas to focus on this season, all easily managed through the Magine Pro Console:
1. Tackle Involuntary Churn with Payment Recovery Tools
Churn doesn’t always happen by choice. Failed payments from expired cards or missed renewals can silently erode your subscriber base, especially over the summer months, when people are travelling or distracted.
Magine Pro’s built-in dunning tools automatically trigger payment reminders and retry cycles. Operators can also send card expiry notifications to prompt users before issues arise, helping reduce revenue leakage without lifting a finger.
Want to know where your biggest retention gaps might be? Our Retention Checklist is a quick self-assessment to help you identify opportunities and benchmark against best practices used by Magine Pro customers.
2. Refresh Your Content Discovery Experience
If your homepage feels static or generic, viewers are more likely to lose interest. Seasonal curation and regularly updated rows help keep the service feeling fresh and relevant, even if your actual content library hasn’t changed.
In the Magine Pro Console, you can:
- Create custom content rows
- Curate by theme, genre, artist, or mood
- Set up time-based promotions (e.g. “Summer Picks,” “Holiday Favourites”)
It’s an easy way to make your platform more dynamic, and every update goes live instantly across all devices.
3. Experiment with Promo Codes and Offers
Need to boost signups or re-engage lapsed users? Summer is a great time to test promotional offers and measure what works before peak season returns.
The Console makes it simple to create and manage promo campaigns that:
- Apply discounts as a percentage or fixed amount
- Target specific countries or user types (e.g. new users only)
- Use viral (shared) or unique (one-time-use) codes
- Define duration, validity dates, and even bypass checkout entirely
Whether you’re running a seasonal campaign or an affiliate partnership, you can tailor your offers without touching any code.
4. Audit and Enhance Metadata for Better Searchability
Your metadata does more than just describe content, it powers discoverability and improves the viewing experience, especially on Smart TVs where users often browse by visuals and search queries.
This is an ideal time to:
- Fill in missing fields like title, synopsis, cast, and genre
- Update or add translations for multilingual audiences
- Optimise artwork (poster and 16:9 formats recommended)
- Use custom tags (if configured) to reflect seasonal themes or content types
All of this can be done in the Media & Metadata section of the Console, with changes published to your service in real time.
Better metadata = better engagement. It’s one of the simplest ways to increase time watched and reduce bounce rates.
5. Prepare for What’s Next
Even small operational changes made now can help you scale more effectively in the months ahead. Whether you’re planning a new content drop, entering a new market, or refreshing your onboarding flow.
Now’s a good time to:
- Review your user journey across devices
Especially on Smart TVs, where features like QR code sign-in can reduce friction and improve the user experience. - Enable anonymous viewing
Let viewers explore your content before signing up. It’s a proven way to increase engagement and drive conversions, especially for AVOD or hybrid services. - Build passive conversion funnels
Combine tools like anonymous viewing, time-limited promo codes, and targeted offers to nudge users toward becoming subscribers, all running quietly in the background once set up.
These small steps now mean less scrambling later, and a stronger foundation heading into the year’s busiest months.
Use Summer Strategically – Without Slowing Down
You don’t need to hit pause to make progress. By using this time to fine-tune your platform, you’ll be better positioned to retain subscribers, deliver stronger experiences, and scale smartly into autumn and beyond.
If you’re not yet on Magine Pro, or want to see the Console in action, we’d love to show you. Book a demo or contact the team to learn more.
OTT: How to increase video content views
Streaming service operators are always striving to boost user engagement within their service and, more specifically, increase video content views. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways operators can leverage their content, service, and even experience to optimise discovery for their users, including maximising their metadata for search and running external marketing and social campaigns.
Optimising the User Interface and Experience
One of the best ways to increase video content views is to optimise the interface and enhance the user experience within the streaming service. If users have a positive experience, they’re more likely to return and recommend it to others.
There are several ways operators can optimise the user interface, including making quality content easy to find. Curating rich categories of entertainment and positioning content high up on the discovery page of the service is one such solution.
Magine Pro-powered streaming services allow operators to curate the discovery page thoroughly, including content category curation and selecting content to hero within the top carousel. Our partners can also use the CMS Console to select what artwork and poster sizes are presented and add engaging and informative titles and descriptions to entice users to choose particular movies or series. Adding additional content, such as trailers and even editorials, will also help expand the discovery experience and give users a clearer idea of what’s available.
Making the Most of Metadata
Another way operators can help to increase content views is to ensure metadata is as SEO-friendly as possible. Metadata is data that defines and describes the data object it is linked to. In this context, metadata describes, via text descriptions, the content of a video, making it readable for search engines.
Ensuring that metadata is SEO-friendly will help content appear much higher in search results both inside and outside a streaming service. To do this, providers should focus on using keywords throughout metadata descriptions, including attention-grabbing and descriptive titles, and adding content summaries that accurately reflect what users will see.
Using the Magine Pro CMS Console, our partners are able to upload, manually edit, and even use custom metadata to help enrich their user experiences and improve search results.
Running External Marketing Campaigns
Service operators can also look to increase discovery and views by running external marketing campaigns focusing on select content instead of the entire streaming service. A strategy like this works particularly well when the chosen content is well-known, sought after, and/or exclusive to the service itself.
Utilising digital channels is a fantastic way to generate interest and track a campaign’s success. Google ads and sponsored social media on audience-relevant platforms are great starting points. And can build out further to partnering with trusted companies or influencers who will promote the content to their loyal audiences and help penetrate new markets.
Magine Pro’s Data Insights toolset gives our partners a clear 360 view of their service’s performance, enabling providers to follow the entire user journey from marketing attribution to engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. Data-led insights like these give operators a complete view of a marketing campaign’s performance and whether focused external content strategies are cost-effective and capable of producing the desired outcome.
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At Magine Pro, we offer a flexible OTT platform that can be customised according to your OTT business needs. Create a video streaming service with us and monetise your live events, linear and VOD content seamlessly through subscription, advertising, and/or transactional business models. What’s more, we have a team of experienced experts on hand who can help you launch and grow your OTT business successfully.
For more guidance on increasing content discovery, views, and engagement, check out our blog. And if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you build and launch a successful OTT business, get in touch with us today.