OTT Question Time 2026 didn’t predict where streaming is going.
It confirmed where it already is.
Subscriber growth alone is no longer the goal. What’s driving decisions now is simpler and more commercial: how quickly audiences find something they care about, whether they come back, and whether the economics hold up over time.
Across two days of panels, the same realities surfaced repeatedly. Not as future bets, but as constraints teams are already operating within.
Three themes stood out.
1) Discovery friction is now the biggest commercial leak
Viewers spending 12–26 minutes deciding what to watch isn’t just bad UX. It’s a sign that discovery is still too generic.
The most effective response isn’t more rows or louder trailers. It’s hyper-personalised experiences, built around dynamic homepages that adapt in real time to who the viewer is, what they’ve engaged with, and the moment they arrive.
Vertical video plays a critical role here, not as a standalone feature, but as a high-signal discovery format inside a personalised experience.
What’s actually working:
- Homepages that change by user, time, device, and context, not one-size-fits-all layouts
- Emotion- and character-led vertical moments that help viewers decide quickly
- Saves, comments, and shares used as stronger signals than raw views
- Using vertical as a rapid testing loop for tone, talent, and story resonance, then feeding those learnings back into long-form placement
This only delivers value when it’s supported end to end, from content operations and rights handling, through targeting and distribution logic, to in-app placement that connects discovery directly to playback without friction.
2) Engagement has overtaken growth as the real success metric
The shift away from “growth at all costs” is now structural.
Teams are optimising for:
- Quality starts, not installs
- Return frequency that builds habit
- Lifetime value relative to acquisition cost
- Audience satisfaction, not just time spent
This is especially visible across MENA and APAC, where scale can arrive quickly but long-term value depends on relevance, language, and cultural context. Platforms optimised for habit and satisfaction consistently outperform those chasing headline numbers.
3) Aggregation is winning because it matches how people actually watch
No streaming service succeeds in isolation anymore.
Unified home screens, shared discovery layers, and pragmatic partnerships are delivering higher satisfaction and lower churn. Netflix increasingly wins by being the default entertainment layer across devices and partner platforms, not by exclusivity alone.
The implication is architectural. Platforms need to be built to coexist, with flexible navigation, scalable metadata, and the ability to onboard partners without turning every new deal into a reintegration project.
What this means for us at Diagnal
These themes closely reflect the problems we’re already helping streaming companies solve.
In practice, that means:
- Reducing discovery friction through dynamic, personalised homepages, with vertical video fully supported inside owned platforms
- Driving engagement quality using experience-led personalisation rather than static recommendation logic (beIN Media saw a 168% increase in engagement)
- Supporting aggregation at scale, enabling multiple services to coexist within shared discovery layers
- Applying AI where it removes operational drag, across localisation, rights, planning, and archives, without replacing creative control
- Building for real-world environments across fragmented hardware and shared home-screen ecosystems common in MENA and APAC
There’s no such thing as zero customisation in premium streaming. Real differentiation demands it. The difference is whether it’s addressed early and deliberately, or discovered late as a constraint.
