Most OTT service providers know enough about their viewers to personalise the experience. The challenge is having a platform that lets them act on that knowledge without a development cycle standing in the way.
By Leyra Team
Most streaming service providers understand their audiences reasonably well. They know which content drives engagement, which segments churn fastest, and broadly which viewers arrived from which campaigns. The harder part is to respond fast and turn that understanding into a different experience for each of those groups.
According to McKinsey, personalisation drives a revenue uplift of 10–15% for companies that execute it well. The gap between knowing that and achieving it tends to come down to one thing: the distance between what a team can see and how they use these insights.
Why personalisation is harder to execute than it looks
A layout change for a specific user segment requires a developer. A campaign landing experience requires a release cycle. A targeted rail for disengaged subscribers requires data from a system that doesn't connect to the editor. When acting on an audience insight involves cross-team coordination, a ticket queue, and several days of lead time, opportunities are either missed or pursued selectively. The streaming services that personalise effectively share one characteristic above all others: their editorial and marketing teams can act on what they know about viewers without routing every change through engineering.
Segmentation and personalisation at Leyra
Service variations
Deliver different versions of your service without fragmenting your platform. Service Variations let you define different content, layouts, or monetisation models, served automatically based on a viewer's location or device.
One Leyra customer uses this to serve region-appropriate content catalogues without fracturing the overall platform experience. Another used it to apply seasonal branding across the Christmas period, adjusting the app's colour scheme for the holiday season. Because variations can be cloned from existing configurations, creating a new regional or seasonal variant does not mean starting from scratch.
Conditional containers
Control what different audiences see without changing the underlying layout. Conditional Containers allow individual content rails to be shown based on a viewer's authentication state, the platform they are on, or the preferences they have declared.
A sign-up prompt disappears once a viewer subscribes. A "Continue Watching" rail surfaces only for paying subscribers. These rules can be combined to create highly specific audience experiences. All of it is configurable through the editor, with a preview mode that shows what each audience segment will see.
URL segmentation
Turn campaign traffic into tailored in-app experiences with URL Segmentation. By embedding a parameter in the link that directs a viewer to the app, Leyra carries that context through to the experience itself. Any container on any page can be configured to appear, or to be suppressed, based on that tag.
A streaming service running a sports season campaign can configure a targeted content rail or a subscription CTA that appears only for viewers arriving via that link. When the campaign ends, the containers revert. Attribution becomes cleaner because conversions can be tied to the specific experience each campaign delivered.
Manual personalisation
Let viewers shape their own experience from the first session with manual personalisation, letting them declare a team, genre, channel, or region preference that then shapes what they see. A sports service for example can ask users which team they support at sign-up, and use that response to surface team-specific content from the first session onwards.
Algorithmic recommendations
Surface more relevant content based on what viewers actually watch. Leyra supports two approaches to surfacing recommendations based on what a viewer has actually watched.
- Leyra's native recommendation capability provides a practical starting point. Content editors can add a "Because you watched" feed to any container, which surfaces recommendations based on the viewer's most recently completed content.
- For services that want a more sophisticated recommendation layer, Leyra integrates with Jump TV's Personalizer (available via the Marketplace). Jump's approach offers AI-based recommendation algorithms such as general personalised recommendations for a specific user, "Because you watched" suggestions, and "Watch Again" prompts for content a viewer has already completed.
We built Leyra around this challenge
Leyra gives teams direct control over segmentation and personalisation, so they can act on viewer insights immediately. Editorial and marketing teams get direct control over segmentation and personalisation, without routing every change through a development cycle.
At its core, Leyra connects the key parts of running a streaming service, so that data and action sit closer to each other than they do when separate systems handle these functions. The segmentation capabilities above are part of that connected structure. Tams configure them through the same interface they use for content and layouts, drawing on the same viewer data the rest of the platform uses.
In practice, that means teams can build and adjust a campaign landing experience while the campaign is live. They can identify a new viewer segment and give it a distinct onboarding experience without a release. They can push seasonal content live with a matching visual treatment configured entirely from Admin. Personalisation stalls when the gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it is wider than the platform allows. Closing that gap is what the platform is designed for.
