What video streaming services can learn from social commerce innovation

The future of streaming is not about passive watching; it’s about delivering great experiences to viewers enabling them to be immersed in their favourite shows. A key component of such experiences is the ability to buy products discovered on screen, with fashion and apparel perhaps the most obvious category. And as the lines between traditional and contemporary media formats blur, video streaming platforms can learn a lot from social media, which has already embraced the concept of frictionless shopping.

Turning passive viewing into active engagement, frictionless shopping on social media enables audiences to buy products discovered in their feed the moment they appear, without leaving the app. The most high-profile examples of this include the raft of social media partnerships announced by Amazon over the past few months including Meta, TikTok, Snap and Pinterest, enabling users to seamlessly discover, browse and buy products while they watch.

Indeed, social media platforms have long understood the art of combining interactive, emotional content with commerce, transforming passive browsing into dynamic ecommerce experiences. For broadcasters and streaming services this provides much inspiration as they develop strategies designed to power the ecommerce opportunity on their own platforms.

Like social media, streaming services are home to a highly-engaged audience with a strong emotional connection to the content they consume. But with a focus on longer-form, studio-produced content, streaming services arguably have an even more compelling opportunity to offer their users the ability to shop the looks and products featured in their favourite shows. Especially if they can borrow a trick from social media, by offering a frictionless shopping experience within the streaming environment, rather than sending viewers away from their platforms via QR codes or affiliate links.

Such an evolution will not only satisfy the desire of viewers for more interactive and personalised streaming experiences, but will also open new revenue streams for both streaming services and ecommerce companies, crafting a new and innovative digital retail channel.

Here’s a summary of some of the key social commerce learnings that streaming services can benefit from:

Ecommerce Delivers Incremental User Data

It’s no secret that data drives insights for the most successful organisations. Social media platforms are already benefitting from the incremental data provided by their ecommerce propositions. For streaming services, this can help drive personalised user experiences, more relevant content recommendations, improved ad targeting criteria, and broader subscriber retention strategies.

Ecommerce Features Work Best When Fully Integrated

Results from a recent Kantar survey commissioned by Jay reveal that 80% of 18-29 year-old viewers want to purchase outfits they’ve spotted in films or TV series. But, until now, the challenge has been how to introduce this functionality so that it offers the frictionless experience craved by audiences, without taking them away from the very show they are watching. This is something we’re passionate about at Jay, and it’s why offering streaming services the ability to integrate a frictionless shopping experience is core to what we do. It’s also at the heart of the approach Amazon is taking across its social media partnerships, enabling users to stay within their favourite social app while delivering an end-to-end retail journey.

Ecommerce Success Depends on Great Product Curation

While AI offers excellent efficiencies in terms of on-screen product identification and matching, success depends on a deep understanding of human product demand, culture, inspiration and taste. That’s why it’s important for both social media and streaming services to embrace a combination of human curation and AI-driven product selection in ecommerce proposition. Indeed, this is also the approach we have adopted at Jay.