Why Recurly for Streaming Media & Entertainment
Digital media and Over the Top (OTT) companies operate in a fast-paced environment, where streaming habits and purchasing trends evolve rapidly as the market itself grows exponentially. Entertainment has shifted to a new era, challenging companies to build customer loyalty dynamically—from acquisition to retention. This, summed up with high transaction volumes, may translate into sky-scraping churn rates.
In a competitive industry, leading businesses like Twitch and Paramount+ rely on subscription management and recurring billing platforms like Recurly for subscription growth. For over a decade, Recurly has helped streaming media companies recover over 70% of failed renewals and experience 68% year-over-year growth.
Focus on products, not payment mechanics
Recurly seamlessly automates and streamlines processes to meet your subscription goals. Optimize your acquisition tactics with flexible plans and promotions, use business intelligence analytics to make strategic decisions, and maximize your revenue with our machine-learning-driven decline management technology.
Tailor your subscription plans
When running OTT entertainment businesses, you need to stay on top of your customers’ ever-evolving needs. Address them with Recurly’s subscription plan management tools:
Configure free trials for customers who try before they buy
Design pricing plans that support every billing scenario, including prepaid, fixed, usage-based, quantity-based, one-time charge, and hybrid models
Engage with your subscribers through personalized offers, promotions, and gift subscriptions
In the subscription industry, the value proposition isn’t focused on single-purchase decisions. While conversions are essential, brand promises have to live up to the subscriber’s perceived value over time. If your company keeps active subscribers for long periods, it means you’re delivering.
Offering value means delivering on your subscriber’s expectations. For example, you might come across customers who enjoy and find your product valuable but need to pause their subscription for various reasons—allowing them to do so rather than canceling is an effective tactic to retain them long-term.
Fight subscriber churn proactively
Reducing churn is key to any successful streaming business, and thanks to Recurly’s decline management strategies, our customers reduced their involuntary churn to 1% by implementing our revenue optimization engine:
Payment decline prevention
Keep your customers’ card information updated with account updater and prevent failed payments by managing expired cards before renewals. This all happens behind the scenes without interrupting service for your subscribers.
Failed transaction recovery
Customize retries for each failed transaction with Recurly’s intelligent retry solution, which analyzes billions of attributes and creates statistical models for retries using machine learning. In addition, our dunning management tools automate tailor-made subscriber notifications for card updates.
With Recurly, OTT businesses recover 12% of credit card billings monthly. How much can you recover from failed transactions? Find out here.
Broaden your horizons
Target subscribers from 195 countries to expand your audience across borders. Recurly’s customized payment, currency, and language support allow you to integrate with 20+ gateways to charge in 140 currencies, calculate local taxes, and issue invoices in regional languages–meeting B2B and B2C regulatory requirements.
Automate your billing to scale
Revamp your billing lifecycle with automatic invoicing across purchases, renewals, and subscription modifications. Recurly collects valuable insights on revenue recognition and eliminates manual processes by integrating with your CRM, tax solution, accounting software, and ERP for more accurate reporting and smooth workflows.
What Recurly can do for you
Set a new standard in subscription experience for streaming media. See what you can achieve with Recurly’s dynamic, flexible, and intuitive platform.
Your area: Growth
How Recurly can help:
Scale your business and realize ROI faster with Recurly’s best-in-class tools and analytics:
Drive exponential subscriber growth
Experiment easily with different pricing, packaging, and promotions to see what is most impactful.
Deliver a frictionless checkout experience.
Easily offer additional payment methods to drive conversion.
Offer one-time and recurring offerings.
Use Recurly’s Subscriber Report to find opportunities and understand subscriber growth trends–monitor your new, churned, returning, and total net subscribers.
Realize ROI faster–our customers get our 12X.
Operate efficiently
Streamline subscription and recurring billing processes to increase your speed to market.
Experiment easily with different pricing, packaging, and promotions to see what is most impactful.
Integrate easily with your CRM, ERP, and 3rd-party software so all of your subscriber data is in one place.
Enhance your customer experience
Architect flexible packaging and trial options for your subscribers.
Test, modify and choose the right billing model for your business.
Customize your checkout process with Recurly.js.
Increase your ARPU with effective acquisition and retention tools like customized coupons, discounts, and trials.
Your area: Product
How Recurly can help:
Design, deliver and sustain a differentiated streaming service with Recurly:
Operate efficiently
Automate your subscription management and recurring billing processes to focus on what matters–your product.
Reduce time-to-market with Recurly’s universal-compatible design and launch your product in weeks.
Manage subscriptions and recurring billing
Automate recurring invoicing, billing, and tax collection regardless of billing model or geography.
Monitor and evaluate your trials and plans performance with Recurly Analytics reports.
Use Recurly’s Recovered Revenue and Monthly Recurring Revenue Reports to track your business growth and squash churn.
Focus on your business growth
Build a tailored pricing and packaging strategy that meets your subscribers’ demands.
Increase your revenue with effective acquisition tools–design customized coupons, discounts, and trials for your customers.
Identify and evaluate subscription growth trends with Recurly’s Subscriber Report.
Your area: Engineering
How Recurly can help:
Don’t let build and maintenance costs take most of your business’ budget–between building or buying, Recurly is the right choice:
Operate efficiently for scalability
Iterate, test, and pivot to go live in weeks with Recurly’s compatible design.
Customize your checkout process and meet security and compliance standards with Recurly.js.
Automate recurring invoicing, billing, and tax collection regardless of billing model or geography.
Onboard and manage your customers through Recurly’s API and get detailed insights to make better decisions.
Route transactions to a principal and backup payment gateway to recover failed payments with Recurly’s Custom Gateway Routing functionality.
Your area: Finance
How Recurly can help:
Recurly helps you reduce manual efforts and simplify billing processes to ease the end-of-month close:
Operate efficiently for revenue recovery
Integrate seamlessly with your ERP, CRM, tax compliance, and fraud management solution for better financial reporting.
Minimize revenue loss from failed payments with Recurly’s Account Updater, which monitors and updates changes in your subscribers’ credit cards.
Identify customers who haven’t paid their invoices with Recurly’s Accounts Receivable Export.
Avoid recurring credit card payment failures with our Intelligent Retry functionality–use machine learning to schedule transaction retry attempts when they’re more likely to succeed.
Recover failed payments with Recurly's Dunning Management functionality–create collection strategies for various customer cohorts with past due invoices.
Your area: Operations
How Recurly can help:
Streamline your processes to support business growth with Recurly’s scaling tools and features:
Operate efficiently
Automate order-to-cash processes with multiple payment systems.
Integrate easily with your preferred CRM, BI, or ERP for better reporting and data visibility.
Improve time-to-market with Recurly’s universal-compatible design.
Manage subscriptions and recurring billing
Automate recurring invoicing, billing, and tax collection regardless of billing model or geography.
Monitor and evaluate your trials and plans performance with Recurly Analytics reports.
Use Recurly’s Recovered Revenue and Monthly Recurring Revenue Reports to track your business growth and squash churn.
Check out our Documentation and Development Hub to learn more.
More than a partner
No matter the size, Recurly’s subscription management platform has driven subscription success for streaming media companies since 2009. Our partners and integrations guarantee a one-of-a-kind customer experience that turns your subscribers into “forever customers.” Whether you’re looking to acquire, engage and retain more viewers, or continue to scale your business for peak viewing, we’re here to help.
Ready to see Recurly in action? Book your demo!
