With an ever-growing number of OTT services competing for audience attention, the need for aggregation has never been more urgent. Streaming promised viewers exceptional choice and control. Yet this instead created a new challenge, content overload. The average household in the US has 5.1 streaming services, with what feels like endless selection of content. The constant switching between apps and multiple accounts can cause subscriber fatigue. This fragmentation creates significant friction in the viewing experience. According to recent studies, 20% of viewers who don’t know what to watch beforehand usually don’t watch anything and do something else instead. More operators are turning to super aggregation with content and platform partners to simplify content discovery for subscribers.
What is Super Aggregation?
Super aggregation refers to the process of bringing together content from multiple platforms into a single, seamless interface. Rather than forcing users to juggle a dozen different apps and subscriptions, a super aggregator offers one unified hub where viewers can search, browse and access all their favorite content. Which is becoming essential for survival in a fragmented market.
One of the main drivers behind the rise of super aggregation is the challenge of content discovery, leading to frustration and reduced consumption by the user.
The Future of Content Discovery in the OTT Landscape
This approach is revolutionizing how content is discovered, consumed and monetized. It’s not just about offering various apps in one place (which many Smart TVs already do), but creating a truly integrated experience where content from diverse sources is seamlessly presented together. This is a strategy particularly for operators, when Sky added Netflix and Amazon Prime or the likes of Amazon Fire TV or Google TV, who have positioned themselves as the leaders in the streaming experiences.
This is a way not only to help grow subscribers for the services that are included, but also to facilitate effective content discovery for the viewers. With an effective universal search and user interfaces presenting content from multiple sources, users are able to search for and consume assets across different catalogs.
Aggregated apps eliminate the need for users to constantly switch apps and offer a single sign-on with one authentication. This is a draw particularly for viewers as it means that they are reducing the time wasted, as most of the time they can just be switching between the different apps.
As well as cross platform search, personalization and recommendations are also combined across different catalogs. Such as if someone had just finished “Stranger Things” on Netflix, compared to just watching it on Netflix, it would suggest other Netflix originals. A super aggregator might recognize the viewer’s preference for sci-fi nostalgia and recommend “The X-Files” on Hulu or “Paper Girls” on Prime Video. Traditionally, each streaming service recommends content from its own catalog, creating discovery silos. Super aggregation breaks these barriers down, presenting content based on relevance rather than source.
How to Transform Content Discovery
Super aggregation fundamentally reshapes the user journey, one of the major issues facing streaming and TV services is that viewers are being swamped by the amount of content. 46% of US viewers feel they are overwhelmed by streaming’s content selection and have a hard time finding what they want to watch. This means that viewers can waste a lot of time, for example, UK viewers can spend up to 182 hours per year searching for content. Super aggregation aims to provide a frictionless viewing experience by seamlessly integrating different services and allowing the discovery of content across all of them.
Super aggregation leverages data from multiple platforms to build more comprehensive user profiles and deliver more accurate recommendations. This approach shifts discovery from “here’s everything we have” to “here’s what you’ll likely enjoy most,” regardless of which service hosts it. To the user, the majority of the time, it doesn’t matter what service the content is available on; what they care about is if they can watch it.
AI can power effective super aggregation. AI algorithms, particularly those using deep learning and natural language processing—can identify subtle patterns across platforms that would be impossible to detect manually. They can understand content beyond basic metadata, analyzing themes, visual styles and emotional tones to create truly intelligent matches. Moreover, AI supports real-time personalization that continuously improves as viewing habits evolve. The most sophisticated aggregators are now implementing AI that combines text analysis of plot descriptions, visual and/or audio analysis of content to create a recommendation engine that approaches human-level understanding of content preferences.
Why Operators Are Embracing Super Aggregation
Super aggregation represents an attractive strategic opportunity for OTT operators and service providers, both in terms of engagement as well as revenue and monetization strategies. The combined content within the one UI and easing the content discovery helps to keep users within the platforms for longer. Bundled services typically see lower cancellation rates, there are opportunities for upsells, advertising integrations and more.
Through understanding what content drives engagement across services with collective user information and metadata drives to build more complete pictures of viewer preferences, this can help operators make more informed decisions about what content to license or produce.
Together with hyper-personalization driven by AI, super aggregators can not only help viewers find the content they love but also learn why they want it, further enriching recommendations and the content discovery journey. With solutions like XroadMedia, we can understand your users on a deeper level and personalize their experience based on mood, time of day, device and more.
However, it’s not without its challenges. There are many barriers to delivering seamless access to different libraries, such as licensing issues. Content rights complexities create barriers, as licensing agreements often restrict how and where content can be displayed or bundled. This is still a major problem for smaller operators in particular.
XroadMedia and Super Aggregation
In a fragmented streaming landscape, super aggregation offers a path to simplicity for viewers and a strategic advantage for operators. By solving genuine user problems around content discovery while creating new monetization opportunities, super aggregation represents the next evolution of the streaming ecosystem.
The streaming wars aren’t ending; they’re evolving into an era where cooperation and integration may prove as important as exclusive content. In this market, helping viewers find what they want to watch, regardless of source, will be the ultimate competitive advantage. At XroadMedia, we believe that watching TV should be simple, bring joy, not frustration. As more operators and other services are aggregating more content, there is a clear need to tailor those experiences, even across platforms, so users are recommended the right content. We bring content seamlessly from multiple sources, apps and libraries and easily deliver personalization regardless of the metadata format.
If you want to know more about how we can help you transform your content discovery strategy, get in touch.
