The OTT Strategy Illusion: Why Big Firms Like Accenture Might Be the Wrong Fit

A few years ago, I sat in a glass-walled boardroom, somewhere high above a European capital, watching a team from one of the “Big Four” unveil their OTT strategy for a media client.

Obviously the presentation was impeccable and impressive: It had everything. Beautiful slides. Buzzwords galore. Even a custom maturity model, nicely color-coded and with arrows going in all direction, naturally. There was one slight issue.

The arrows did not make sense, because none of their assumption would actually work.

What looked great on paper, wasn’t built for this client. It was built for someone else. Some global average. A mythical “OTT entity” who lives in every RFP and in none of the real markets.

In that boardroom I witnessed what I encounter on a regular base by now: big consultancies are not failing at OTT strategy because they are not smart. They are failing because they’re not individually tailored enough.

What the Decks Will Not Tell You

When you know how big firms work, you will also understand why they fail in such specific expertise fields like launching an OTT service (or any similar project for that matter). Firms like Accenture are phenomenal at many things: transformation at scale, post-merger integration, procurement processes.

But ask them to do a proper, successful OTT or Streaming strategy? They are at a loss. Because creating a proper OTT solution is a messy undertaking. It is a high-stake, emotional, risky and often controversial undertaking. It is about creating relevance for an audience and that ends up to be about taste, timing, and twitch-speed decisions.

It is about understanding that a mass-market oriented streaming platform in a market with a lot of free content and strong public broadcasters has completely different pain points than one that targets a very specific niche audience. That a viewer doesn’t give a damn about your churn model if your app takes more than 5 seconds to load or the content does not resonate with them within the first 2 minutes.

OTT is not a theory about a technical platform. It is walking through a terrain full of holes, dirt and unchartered pathways.

Navigating such a terrain is not done from a spreadsheet or sifting endless stacks of data.

The Speed Mismatch

In OTT, a format that worked six months ago is already stale. Viewer trends shift with a meme. Tech updates break your ad stack overnight.

And yet, here we are and still watching billion-dollar firms propose 12-month “diagnostic phases” and multi-layered stakeholder workshops before a single experiment goes live.

By the time the strategy playbook is approved, YouTube has taken up your market segment.

Meanwhile, boutique consultancies like ours are digging the dirt. We have already concluded another test of new revenue and monetization models with real clients in real-live settings. We have gone through the pain with clients to adjusted the pricing model not only twice but almost with regular intervals. We have secured content rights and partnered our clients with the best tech solution provider and local distribution partners. And we have killed that feature no one actually used.

Because we do not have time not to move.

Big Doesn’t Mean Brave

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about these guys in the grey suits: The larger the firm, the more political the advice. They will not take risks, they will not make anything bold, egdy or controversial. They remain grey.

Boutique firms will tell you the hard truth. We will tell you when your UI sucks. We put the finger in content budget that is misallocated. We will point out that your customer journey breaks in six places. We put your nose in the dirt: we show your how irrelevance can look like before you smell it.

Big firms instead play it polite: They often tell you what won’t get them fired. Their job is to keep the client, not to shake the system. They will use you to train their staff and creating fancy business cases. That is not a dirty job – after all, they wear suits.

Doing OTT these days requires the willingness to shake up things and even if it means: you should not do it at all. We had clients that we advised against launching a service – and we worked with them on successful alternatives. Sometimes, you should forget about creating yet another “Center of Excellence” and you just build a “little dirt room”.

So, Who Do You Want in that Dirt Room?

If you’re facing OTT decisions right now like launching it at all, or what platform to choose, how monetization can work, what growth is realistic, etc, you first need to ask yourself: Do you want 15 consultants who fly in on Monday, run a playbook, and leave you with a 70-slide PDF? Or do you want three people who know the terrain in and out, roll up their sleeves, and stay in the room when the numbers get ugly?

The right OTT partner isn’t always the loudest or the biggest. But they’ll be the one who dares to tell you when your emperor has no clothes.

Want help figuring out your next OTT move with no jargon, no detours, and no BS?
If that is your aspiration, I promise we don’t bring extensive slide deck, but we work with you on delivering clarity and results.