The Problem we Kept Seeing

Being in Video OTT Space from 2013 onwards, where we got an opportunity to build, deliver and manage front-end applications for various OTT Streamers and Operators globally, I got a first-hand understanding of challenges that the OTT operations teams used to face in managing the fresh experience with content on their respective OTT platforms.

As device complexity increased and expectations around freshness grew, operations teams were under constant pressure to move faster. They needed flexibility to promote content quickly and respond to what was happening on the platform in real time.

That pressure almost always landed on engineering teams. And no matter how much planning happened upfront, there was always urgency—leading to confusion, last-minute changes, and friction between teams. No Matter how different teams try to communicate and plan before hand, there was always a sense of urgency which always led to confusion between tech and operations teams. 

Why we decided to Build Experience Manager

Back in 2019, when we started building Experience Cloud (White label Video Solution), it was very clear that we should focus on solving the immediate pain-point to address the needs of operations team in giving them full flexibility and control in the way they managed the experience on the platform.

We named it as Experience Manager with primary focus on giving full control to operations team on three key business problems:

1. What Operations / Content teams want to show and promote on OTT devices?
2. How Operations / Content teams want to show content?
3. Where Operations / Content teams want to show their content?
   
   

The 3 Questions we built around

With focus on these three business problems to solve, we started building Experience manager.

What Operations / Content teams want to show and promote on OTT devices?

We realized operations teams needed a way to decide what shows up—without engineering involvement. They had complete flexibility in terms of defining different rules in the way they want to show the content on the platform such as New Movies, New Series or giving them full flexibility in terms of organizing the content without any pre-defined rules and showcasing on different devices.

How Operations / Content teams want to show content?

We introduced a concept of Widget where the teams had flexibility of creating different types of layouts Such as Carousels, Swim Lanes, Hero Banners to name a few. Each of these Widgets came with their own set of properties and rules that gives flexibility to business teams in terms of showcasing how would they like to showcase their content on the front-end devices.

Where Operations / Content teams want to show their content?

It was very important to give flexibility to Business teams to showcase their content where they want to show on the front-end applications. We introduced drag drop editor in experience manager where the teams can easily drag drop the sequence of widgets that get showcases on the apps in real-time.

Making it Work in Real World

While we got all the above business challenges together in experience manager, there were few important technical considerations that we had to align with:

1. Real-Time Updates on Devices: No Operations team likes to wait for changes to take effect on the devices. The teams are not bothered about the technical limitations such as caching etc. In order to give them full control on the experience it was important that the changes should be reflected immediately on the devices
2. Flexibility to Show Different content on different devices: Business teams treat each device separately and it was important to provide them flexibility to show-case different content on different devices.

Now Experience Manager has become a standard feature for all OTT platforms where they are building or managing in-house or provided by other vendors. 

Whats Next

As business needs have grown more mature and complex, expectations from Experience Manager have evolved as well. Years of working closely with enterprise and tier-2 customers—and listening carefully to their feedback—have reinforced one thing: experience management must continuously adapt to how businesses operate.

That learning continues to shape how we evolve Experience Manager.