Happy Wednesday War & Peaceniks. Ready to watch me fall on my apps?
👆 MY NEW VIDEO SERIES “HOW TO CURE YOUR PAIN IN THE APPS” SEE ALL THE EPISODES HERE.
There are nearly 9 million apps in the world. There are 200+ video streaming apps available globally, yet the average person uses only about 9 apps each month. And the average American consumer really only uses five video streaming apps (paid and free) on the regular. Assuming one of those is YouTube (90% of consumers), and another is Netflix (78% of Americans), that leaves just three slots for your video app in the lives of the average consumer.
Additionally, to be competitive, the average video app provider must traverse at least ten different devices if they want to be uniformly available to a critical mass of consumers in the markets that they serve. Here in the US, that includes Roku, Fire, Samsung, LG, Vizio, TCL, Hisense, Google TV, Apple TV, iOS, Android, not mention Xbox and PCs. Typically, this means your application needs to be designed not as one single app, but rather a dozen variations of an app, each with its own nuances and languages.
Beyond that, while getting an app to market feels like a big, heavy, important lift – the thing we hang countdown clocks on the wall to track – launch day is like giving birth. Day one is just the start – that special gem you just brought into the world now needs to be fed, rocked to sleep, cared for and, perhaps most importantly, it must be changed every single time it poops. And each change is not like changing just one diaper on just one smelly kid – it means making the same change, in diJerent ways, on every single device where your app plays out. This is not ONLY true when the app breaks and needs to be fixed.
Launch day is like giving birth. Day one is just the start – that special gem you just brought into the world now needs to be fed, rocked to sleep, cared for and, perhaps most importantly, it must be changed every single time it poops.
But, like a child who grows and needs new shoes every four months, as your service’s usage grows, and its voice changes, your app needs to grow and change, and improve with your users. It needs braces. And dance lessons. And a tutor for Mandarin. And each one of these changes – each tweak, each redesign, every improvement – must be made in different languages, across all those devices.
If you’ve ever been a part of the development, launch, and maintenance of a streaming app, then you know just how laborious, all-consuming, and endless the process is. If operating one video streaming app on one device is like running a busy restaurant, then launching and managing a streaming service through an application, across the myriad platforms we now utilize, is like opening a dozen diners in twelve different cities across an array of time zones – so many kitchen fires, so many broken dishes, so many health inspectors to be bribed.
If you are a senior executive at a Media company who publishes video streaming apps, but you are NOT the person directly responsible for the creation, production, distribution, and operation of those apps, much of this mishigas is beyond arm’s length away from your office. I have found much of the innovation, dedication, friction, frustration, cost, and pain of making those apps run smoothly – whenever and wherever anyone anywhere turns on any device to open your service – is out of your sight, and out of your mind. In most cases, the only time most C-Suite moguls think about this labyrinth process, is when their CTO visits them during budget season, seeking more resources, and the mogul screams “More money?! We need to make more cuts!”
All that 👆 is why I will never run a direct-to-consumer video streaming app again (RIP Seeso).
That is also why I partnered with the app innovators at Applicaster for a brand new, five-part video series called How to Cure Your Pain In The Apps. The very first episode is at the top of this missive.
In the series, I interview some of biggest brains in video streaming apps to ask them how the app sausage gets made, where the main points of friction are, how they decide when to build a piece of the tech stack and when they choose to outsource/buy it, and (in the end) how to make the whole app process less painful and more efficient – for the publishers of these apps, but, perhaps more importantly, for the most important people in the app continuum: The end users.
In today’s first episode: Meet the Players – the cast of our series, and the folks who make and run some of the most important video streaming apps in the ecosystem.
This is a topic I’ve obsessed over ever since I launched Seeso eight years ago. And this series was a total friggin’ blast to make. We’ll drop a new episode each week for the next month. I hope you enjoy it.
I also hope you enjoy the day.
ESHAP
...seeso was dope dude...