The entertainment market is awash with a deluge of digital platforms, and the one thing that’s not lacking from any one of the major players is content. Browse the lineup on Netflix or peruse the games on the PlayStation Store, and you’ll be blasted by hundreds, if not thousands, of choices.
Due to how catalogue size has effectively become irrelevant, it’s no longer really a competitive advantage. Quality trumping quantity is also a lower priority for digital platforms, because with so many projects and products arriving all the time, there’s a good chance some high-level hits will arrive alongside the average-to-poor counterparts. That’s why experience is now the main battleground on which these platforms compete.
The Discoverability Struggle
As digital content catalogues grow bigger, the challenge for users becomes working out what to consume from the available offerings. That’s why the best-loved streaming services emphasise a combination of algorithmically driven and human-curated discoverability, along with standard search tools for those who have a better idea of exactly what they’re looking for.
Categorisation is also key here, and again, Netflix spearheaded the trend of grouping movies and TV shows both into genres and into far more specific categories, consisting of titles that fit into a unique niche, whether that’s Supernatural Soaps or Gentle British Reality TV.
A similar approach is adopted in online casinos, where the likes of this trusted iGaming platform group slots according to popularity, as well as based on specific features, like whether bonus buys are available. So again, the number of games on offer is far less relevant than how simple it is to discover ones suited to a given user.
The Performance Question
Another lynchpin of how digital platforms compete to win over and retain end users is the way the experience plays out from a performance point of view. So, looking at video streaming services, there’s a balance to be struck between image quality and the amount of connection bandwidth required for playback. Netflix goes so far as to have subscription tiers specific to 4K playback for this very reason, both as a way of covering its own additional costs involved in serving such high-bitrate content to end users, and as a means of ensuring that customers don’t have to pay extra for an aspect of the platform that they might not be technically capable of using in their location.
Performance is even more important for digital gaming platforms, and how it plays out depends on the way the games are hosted. For iGaming, it’s less of an issue, because the games tend to be lightweight and designed to run in-browser, meaning that once the initial load has completed, connection speed shouldn’t hamper the UX. For cloud gaming services, where the number crunching happens on a server, and the result is streamed to the player, there’s a lot more sensitivity to input lag and streaming artefacts.
The importance of offering a top-tier experience to customers, rather than only trying to win them over with catalogue size, will only increase with time, because user expectations are always rising. The digital platforms that desire a greater share of the market need to focus on this aspect in order to thrive.
