The pandemic crisis did cause an unparalleled boom in the OTT Market globally. The OTT revolution has advanced significantly, from a small number of OTT platform providers in 2012 to approximately 40+ operators. The OTT service providers offer cable TV, news, movies, daily soaps, web series, and other sorts of media content. With the most widely used platforms, you may watch your beloved TV series on various linked devices. Due to technological limits, this was never feasible with conventional cable TV. The sheer diversity of video content available today is extraordinary, and we all can agree that it has made us binge-watch our favorite shows.
As it is now apparent that mobile apps are necessary for every OTT platform. According to Statista, Between 2018 and 2020, the number of over-the-top (OTT) video services used per user increased globally. The number of services used per user in the United States has increased from 5.7 to seven. At the end of November 2020, Indians used 8.6 services. In particular, if your business model is SVoD and your viewers expect to be able to watch on their phones, failing to have a mobile-first approach in the upcoming years could be fatal. To compete with all the brand-new apps that are created every day, a mobile app needs to be able to handle high demands. Thus, high-class mobile app development requires more than just good design and seamless functioning.
Table of Content 📃 What is Flutter? Features of OTT app Things to consider for OTT apps Benefits of Flutter for OTT apps App built on Flutter Conclusion
What is Flutter, and why do developers and CTOs love it?
Basic requirements for the creation of mobile apps include good performance and appealing graphics. And in this watch-on-the-go era, we need apps that can be accessed anywhere and anytime. But only some platforms are compatible with smart TVs, Mac, Windows, Android, or iOS operating systems.
Flutter is an open-source User Interface (UI) toolkit developed by Google that allows developers to build cross-platform apps using a single code base while retaining native-looking design elements. Although, a native application, which is said to have higher performance and compatibility with the mobile environment, is one of the options for tools while developing. The other option is to use a tool that only needs one code base to support several platforms and is thus simpler to maintain. And seasoned consultants recommend to hire Flutter app developer or another cross-platform solution to accomplish it.
Before you discover why Flutter should be your first choice for OTT development, let us provide you with a list of must-have features to consider while in OTT app development.
Features of the OTT app
Sign-Up & Login
There should be several ways to register for the app in it. The procedure of entering each user’s data shouldn’t take too long. Instead, a user should be able to sign up using any of his or her social network accounts to expedite the process. The user can join up quickly and without losing patience thanks to a faster process.
Search bar
It is a necessary part of every OTT app development. More than 70% of customers think that using the search feature is essential to discover the content they want. In addition, if a user cannot find the desired content, roughly half of users unsubscribe from their memberships.
Linguistic diversity
Ensure the network supports many languages if you’re producing video content for a broad viewing public. Users will be able to navigate the app in the language of their choice.
Dashboards based on roles
This supports the creation of numerous marketing tactics. The administrator can get current statistics on user behavior. You may follow it via the app.
Formulation of Recommendations (AI)
These platforms employ user ratings and reviews to regulate the material that is displayed on each user’s screen.
Watch List
This list feature allows users to add content they want to play later, which must be a priority for a video streaming service.
Payment Interface
To collect payments when consumers choose a subscription plan and proceed to pay, you must connect a payment gateway. You must offer customers a range of payment methods, including debit/credit cards, net banking, UPI, and e-wallet apps. Alternatively, select a reliable payment gateway provider.
In-App Notifications
Using the platform’s push notification tool, you may inform users when new material has been posted. This makes it simple for them to explore the videos or watch the teaser.
Things to keep into consideration
Content curation
Fantastic content storage is useless if consumers can’t quickly and easily find relevant stuff. Make it easy for consumers to see their favorite content. Create effective recommendation systems based on a viewer’s prior viewing experience using AI/ML technology.
Streaming experience
In an OTT app, the playback experience is crucial. Even while it seems clear, a lot of people regretfully neglect it.
The goal should be to produce videos with excellent resolution. The development team must be sure that the content supports these options and provides an amazing content-watching experience because users have devices that support 4K, HDR10, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos.
Users strongly dislike having to wait when watching their preferred content. For faster speed and to avoid delays, select a CDN or server with sufficient capacity. Utilize tools like video analytics to track faults and correct them as soon as possible.
Benefits of using Flutter for OTT development
The user interface and app structure are identical on all platforms
Being experts, we are aware that practically every cross-platform framework offers a method for transferring code across the target platforms. Other than Flutter, there are no additional application frameworks that enable sharing of both the UI code and the UI itself.
Rendering engine
For rendering, Flutter leverages Skia. This engine enables the Flutter UI to be launched on almost any platform. There is these C++ 2D graphics library assists Flutter in rendering widgets quickly and seamlessly for a fluid user interface and quick animations. It is also utilized as the graphics engine in Chrome and Firefox browsers. To put it another way, the development process is highly efficient as UI no longer needs to be changed to be transferred to a platform. Similarly, there are plenty of Flutter libraries and packages, which makes the app development process easier.Â
Animated UIs of all levels are available
The freedom to customize everything you perceive on the screen, no matter how complex it might be, is among Flutter’s significant perks. While it is typically possible to create a reasonably tailored user interface on native systems as well, the work involved is much different.
Flutter boosts processes with flexibility and adaptability without adding to the workload. Flutter enables you to easily carry out shared element animations, curve alterations, clipping, and transformations.
Reduced time spent on development
With Flutter’s “hot reload” capability, you may observe the changes that have been made very immediately without affecting the state of your application. And precisely this is what accelerates the development of Flutter apps by a magnitude of several hundred.
Further, the Flutter team has worked tirelessly to offer an enormous selection of widgets that are ready for usage. Most of them are highly adjustable, which saves you more time than any other framework has ever been able to. Flutter offers a sizable collection of Material and Cupertino widgets that flawlessly replicate the behavior of each design language in addition to a large number of basic layout widgets. The entire process of developing an app is sped up, made more straightforward, and less stressful by using Flutter because it enables you to skip several excruciatingly tedious steps.
Quick time-to-market
This one is relatively easy to understand. In comparison to its rivals, Flutter development is more responsive. When compared to developing the same app individually for Android and iOS, you can often anticipate that a Flutter project will require comparatively fewer work hours, which results in lowering app development cost.
You can include the necessary visuals in your app without developing any platform-specific code. Any 2D-based UI can be implemented using Flutter without requiring interaction with a similar native app. Moreover, Flutter offers a declarative UI construction API, which significantly improves efficiency.
An experience similar to native apps
The performance of the app depends on its user experience. Although exact numbers are difficult to determine, it is safe to assume that Flutter applications will run as well as native apps in the majority of situations, and even better in complicated UI animation situations.
Flutter doesn’t depend on any interpreters or intermediary code descriptions. Any performance problems stemming from the interpretation process are eliminated because Flutter apps are immediately incorporated into machine code. Eventually, Flutter allows you to fully assemble your release app in advance.
Access to a broader audience with better interoperability
By developing apps with Flutter, one can create apps for a variety of devices and operating systems. By offering content on a variety of devices, OTT brands can reach a wider audience. Brands can build apps with uniform UX and UI using this framework. Consequently, even when switching devices of different screen sizes or operating systems, the user will continue to enjoy the same interface and experience.
Example of video content app build using Flutter
The official app of the hit Broadway musical, Hamilton. It includes daily lotteries, exclusive news and videos, and more. With the help of Flutter, developers build a high-performing streaming app that gives a consistent experience across different platforms.
Conclusion
A shortcode that quickly produces a vibrant, juicy visual of your app that informs each of your users. This may strike as being implausible. But because of how much the world has evolved, what was once considered implausible is now expected. The catchphrase for this new era should be “dreams come true, attractively and correctly, without much hardship.” Another approach to living by this mantra is to start leveraging the benefits of Flutter. We don’t see any barriers preventing you from acquiring a sensational app thanks to the advantages of Flutter app development. All you need to do is express your want, and a skilled team will go to work.
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