Accedo – Linking Investment Directly to Impact
Martin Sebelius, CEO, Accedo Video Solutions
Video services are currently facing pressure on multiple fronts. A huge number of services are all competing for viewers’ attention, so competition is fierce. Pricing, content availability, and user experience are all key factors that drive subscribers to churn, and with minimum barriers to cancel, users can quickly and easily leave one service and join another. This makes churn difficult to contain. User expectations are also rising and evolving faster than services can keep up, making viewer engagement a real challenge. At the same time, content acquisition and production costs are rising, but OTT providers can’t always pass these costs on to subscribers, for fear of driving churn. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a delicate balancing act. Viewers are also incredibly unforgiving, so video services must deliver a consistently top-quality service. For long term survival in such a competitive market, providers need to implement the right strategy to drive sustainable growth.
What worked in the past during streaming’s boom years doesn’t bring about the same results in today’s market, so video services are having to reassess how they allocate their resources. Many still operate on input-driven models that prioritize feature delivery over impact, leading to higher costs without meaningful gains in loyalty or engagement. However, success today depends less and less on constantly launching new features. Given the multitude of external pressures faced by OTT companies, it’s critical that providers ensure that every dollar spent directly contributes to the right outcomes, whether that’s reducing churn, increasing lifetime value (LTV), lowering operational overhead, or improving service quality. The question is, how can video providers ensure that investment delivers the outcomes that matter the most?
Why the Traditional Approach is Flawed
Historically, media companies made investment decisions based on multi-year ROI projections. Technology stacks were monolithic, and decisions around software, hardware, and operations were often siloed across departments. Total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations typically focused on total outlay over time, including licensing, cost of missed opportunity, hosting, maintenance, and slow time-to-market, as well as internal and external misaligned product resourcing.
While this approach worked when services were able to be much more static, and new features formed part of long release cycles, the streaming industry today is much more fluid. Viewer preferences and expectations evolve at a much faster rate, and so an approach where inputs and outputs are largely fixed is no longer effective. Yet, many services still operate on input-driven models that prioritize feature delivery over impact, which can lead to higher costs without meaningful improvements in KPIs. Although launching shiny new features may feel like progress, it often fails to deliver measurable improvement in key outcomes such as reducing churn or increasing LTV.
OTT success depends less on how much is spent, and more on how effectively that spend translates into impact. This is why video providers need to start reframing TCO models around business outcomes, so that services can ensure that expenditure directly contributes to the outcomes that matter.
Designing for Outcomes, Not Outputs
For years, OTT providers have focused on adding more features, yet these may not make a difference where it matters. The shift toward outcome-based investment starts with changing that mindset. Instead of treating costs like isolated silos, to be successful, providers need to view the entire service as an interconnected system where architecture, data, and orchestration are all part of a continuous feedback loop.
Traditional OTT platforms rely on tightly coupled systems that may be cost effective to acquire but expensive to maintain and slow to evolve. Composable platforms, by contrast, allow for modular assembly of capabilities, enabling faster iteration, greater flexibility, and reduced duplication. This architectural shift lowers integration costs and unlocks agility.
AI, and in particular agent-based orchestration, will no doubt be an integral part of this shift. When built into the design of the video platform, it will enable intelligent automation that can optimize user journeys, triage operational issues, and personalize experiences in real time. This will reduce manual effort, accelerate time-to-insight, and directly impact business KPIs like churn, ARPU (average revenue per user), and LTV. Intelligent agents can monitor user behavior, trigger interventions when churn risk rises, resolve service issues and adapt the user experience in real time.
This approach will significantly impact operational efficiency, and will also
link together technology effort and business impact. Each investment decision becomes a lever to influence specific KPIs, such as trial conversion, ARPU, or service uptime.
Treating Investment as a Continuous Lever
The OTT services that thrive in the coming years will be the ones that successfully maximize the value of each dollar spent. This means designing platforms for adaptability, enabling AI to continuously optimize the service, and measuring success based on outcomes, not features. Consequently, TCO models need to be reframed around business outcomes, so that video services can shift from tracking costs in isolation to treating investment as a continuous lever to deliver the desired outcomes. The successful service operating under this model is one in motion, capable of self-adjustment as business priorities evolve, where data is the mechanism that closes the loop, determining where investment goes, and allowing platforms to continuously test, learn, and improve.
OTT providers that embrace this model will find themselves better positioned to respond to change. They will be able to scale with precision rather than volume, automate tasks without losing quality, and pivot quickly as audience preferences evolve. Success will be determined by how well a video provider can correlate financial investment with video service impact.
