Now that you’ve got content, you want to stream it.

But what else? Put in ads? Charge more for better quality? Create super-personalized experiences?

How about this, though: how about … all of it?

Recycle. Upcycle. Reuse. It’s all the rage.

Same goes for content: if you’re in the OTT industry and you’ve got stuff you’ve shown, why not repurpose it?

Repackaging and re-distributing material that’s already been on the market isn’t new. But refreshing your archived content in the OTT (video streaming) space is.

In dinner terms, dishing out succulent seconds of your content instead of dumping it and creating a new meal from scratch is not only cheaper. Repurposing is faster, less wasteful, and easier.

So how can you repurpose content? What more can you do with it besides showing it?

1. Make money from content by inserting ads

Unified Virtual Channel comes loaded with technology that eases the insertion and replacement of advertisements. Nice, right?

Not only that, the solution packs in Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech, to protect your content, and to ensure that nobody else profits from what’s yours. Capitalizing on your content is discussed at greater length in this blog about monetization.

2. Target very specific audiences

Inclusiveness matters, but sometimes you’ve gotta play bouncer. Got a world première you’re not about to show to just anyone? Unified Virtual Channel has a can-do attitude about keeping the riff-raff out.

Want to set fixed viewing appointments and invite a select group to view your content? You can do that. You can also usher new high-profile films straight to a streaming service.

How about mixing live with VOD, but making it members only? That’s a can-do.

Let’s say you want to treat particular fans of a particular team to footage of epic moments from the club’s history, right before a title-clinching game. With your fans pumped up, you can transition seamlessly from VOD content to the live action.

And after they see their team win (fingers crossed), you can spend the goodwill credits you’ve banked from providing such a great live streaming experience of the game, and keep them in the zone. Go ahead and retain that viewership. Give the fans more of what they crave: a perfect post-game VOD lineup of more historic action, biopics of famous players and coaches, or promos for upcoming games, for example.

And please don’t lose any sleep over cinematic quality, because Unified Virtual Channel can easily stream all the top-shelf codecs.

3. Personalize the heck out of your content

If you have AI recommendation tools that you prefer over others, then wow, you really know your AI recommendation tools. (Needless to say, you can use your preferred AI tools with Unified Virtual Channel.)

With Unified Virtual Channel, you can highlight content featuring a viewer’s favorite artist, actor, or athlete. So, for instance, you could throw focus to the fashion of Rihanna, films of Zendaya, or Wimbledon wins of the Williams sisters. Not fans of them? No biggie, the content’s for your viewers, not you.

4. Out-Ted-Talk those Ted Talks

Fatigued from influencers jabbering about cars, clothes, and gear they get paid to talk about? How about programming something illuminating for once?

You can funnel content into the learning ecosystem. Spotlight special topics. Let interested people tune into your repurposed content, and suddenly you’re teaching someone something useful.

Whether you’ve got an audience full of college students, lifelong learners, or 40-somethings living in their parents’ basements, you can provide tutorials, webinars, breakout sessions, and course catch-up topics for additional learning opportunities.

5. Let lean teamwork make the green stream work

Repurposing your pixels helps the planet. How?

It saves energy.

The work required to produce just one new minute of film might astonish you. When you repackage content, the cost of energy decreases quite quickly. And the cost in dollars drops right along with it.

A software- and playlist-driven solution like Unified Virtual Channel is your ticket to saving time, money, and energy.

Since it operates as a pull-based approach, any Unified Virtual Channel starts running only when viewers start watching, making it a truly green approach. In video streaming, what’s better for the environment than starting to use compute power only when your viewers tune in to your service, and never before?

Also, because playlists drive the solution, there’s no need for an encoder that gobbles up electricity.

Reusing previously produced content reduces human and machine effort, also known as carbon output. So, stream greener. And feel good about it, too, why not?

Generally, finding audiences for your content depends on the quality of your content. With the Unified Virtual Channel solution, however, the barrier to entry is low. Trying out new streams, rehashing what you’ve got, drawing new crowds, costs little.

You can target particular groups, personalize your streams, teach someone a thing or two, and tread lightly on the environment through it all. And if you spend money, you’re covered: you can always recoup your costs via ad monetization.

For more info, check out Unified Virtual Channel’s landing page. Or if you’re interested, book a free trial of the solution here. Or book a personal demo here.

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