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It often starts with familiar signs: rising technical complexity, growing operational costs, or an internal team stretched too thin to innovate. When you’re spending more time firefighting than improving your service, it might be time to bring in a managed services partner.
Running a modern streaming platform means managing multiple devices, live events, integrations, and ever-evolving technologies. Maintaining uptime and quality across that ecosystem demands constant attention and deep technical expertise.
A strong managed services partner can bring to your team market insights, best-practice guidance, and recommendations shaped by what they see across the industry. They help you anticipate trends, avoid common pitfalls, and make smarter decisions about your technology ecosystem.
In other words, your internal team will be freed up to focus on content, growth, and innovation, while experts handle monitoring, maintenance, and optimization.
It’s about gaining a partner who supports your long-term vision, accelerates your roadmap, and strengthens your ability to compete without carrying every operational burden alone.
The right partner should combine OTT industry experience, scalability, and 24/7 operational support, with proven reliability and strong compliance standards. They should offer clear processes, measurable results, and case studies that demonstrate their ability to deliver continuous quality.
So, how do you assess whether a provider is the right fit for your business?
Here’s what to keep in mind before outsourcing your operations — and how we at Accedo approach managed services in practice.
A great managed services provider doesn’t just run your operations; they care about the success of your service. Unlike traditional outsourcing, where the relationship often stops at task execution, a managed services model is built on partnership.
Your provider should be invested in your KPIs, your user experience, and your long-term strategy — not just their own deliverables.
You should retain full control over strategic decisions, content, and product direction, while your partner handles the operational complexity behind the scenes. But beyond that, they should bring recommendations, raise flags early, and proactively look for ways to improve performance, efficiency, and quality.
Ask prospective partners to clearly define which responsibilities they’ll manage — from backend systems and app maintenance to third-party integrations and release cycles. You should always have transparency into what’s happening, and access to performance data and decision-making processes.
Technology is only as good as the people who operate it. Not every vendor can truly manage end-to-end service operations. Look for a provider with cross-functional teams who understand the full ecosystem — cloud architecture, application delivery, QA, analytics, and customer experience.
But expertise today also means knowing how to navigate a complex landscape of third-party tools and platforms. The right managed services partner doesn’t just operate your stack; they also orchestrate multiple vendors, understand the risks and strengths of each solution, and ensure everything works together seamlessly.
Ask how they train and upskill their teams, and whether they have structures in place to share best practices and governance across both internal teams and external vendors. This is what creates true consistency, reliability, and long-term excellence.
Managed services can reduce your total cost of ownership over time, but not all savings are created equal. The right partner brings long-term efficiencies through automation, reusable components, and reduced vendor sprawl.
They should be able to help you model costs realistically before you commit. Look for providers who use scenario modelling based on past services they’ve operated — mapping likely support demand, platform complexity, peak events, and change velocity into clear cost projections.
Predictable cost comes from concrete milestones and continuous optimization. Your partner should define scope and assumptions up front, tie costs to measurable phases of delivery, and revisit the model as the service evolves — with SLAs, fair usage policies, and clear governance built in. If pricing feels vague or open-ended, that’s a red flag.
Switching to a managed service should never feel like starting over. The biggest risk in any outsourcing project is migration — getting your systems, data, and workflows moved without breaking what already works.
That’s why it’s essential to look for a partner with a proven process for both prevention and recovery. Smooth transitions aren’t about perfection; they’re about preparation. It’s not enough to hear that “everything will be fine” - because it won’t always be. Things can very easily go wrong at some point. What matters is whether your partner has the discipline, experience, and transparency to handle those moments effectively.
Ask vendors how they plan to prevent issues during migration - and just as importantly, how they recover when something slips through. The right partner will be upfront about the risks and show you how they prepare for, contain, and learn from incidents.
Your viewers expect consistent quality everywhere — on web, mobile, and connected TV. That means your partner should monitor and maintain performance across the entire ecosystem, not just isolated components.
Ask how they measure quality end-to-end: which technical KPIs and tools are in place (uptime, playback errors, latency), and how they track user-experience performance too — things like confusing flows, slow interactions, navigation friction, or drop-off points that don’t show up as “bugs” but still hurt engagement. How often do they conduct load testing, UX audits, or post-incident reviews? A proactive, data-driven approach to both technical and UX quality is what sets true managed service experts apart.
A managed services provider shouldn’t just keep things running — they should help you evolve. Look for partners who build innovation into their delivery model, enabling you to experiment, scale, and adapt quickly.
If you’ve reached the point of calling in an expert, chances are your in-house teams are already stretched — focused on keeping the lights on rather than moving forward. That’s normal. When teams operate alone, they carry the full operational burden and often end up coping instead of innovating.
The advantage of a managed services model is shared scale. When vendors support multiple customers, they can distribute operational effort and reinvest those learnings into better processes, automation, and new technology. That economy of scale becomes a source of innovation — something no single in-house team can easily replicate.
So, if you’re giving up a bit of control or taking on some outsourcing risk, make sure you’re getting something far greater in return: access to innovation, not just cost savings. A strong managed services partner turns stability into progress — helping you stay ahead of what’s next.
Today, AI and automation play a huge role in driving efficiency. From predictive monitoring and intelligent incident detection to AI-driven personalization and experimentation, the right provider uses automation to stay ahead of problems and continuously improve customer engagement in real time. Ask how they’re applying AI to future-proof both your operations and your viewer experience — because innovation shouldn’t stop once the service goes live.
Everything we covered above — from control and collaboration to innovation and AI — forms the foundation of how we approach managed services.
With that in mind, here are a few questions you’ll likely have before deciding to outsource your operations to us, and we’ve prepared the answers below.
You’ll retain ownership of your content strategy, brand, and overall product vision, but you won’t be alone in shaping how the service evolves. We partner with you on the product roadmap by bringing user insights, market perspective, and operational learnings to the table, helping prioritize what drives the best business outcomes.
On the operational side, we manage everything required to keep the service stable and improving day to day: backend infrastructure, application maintenance, testing and releases, observability, and third-party integrations.
Yes. Our global teams combine expertise across engineering, operations, design, and data analytics to cover every layer of your service.
We also have an Operations Center of Excellence (OCOE) — a cross-functional unit that defines best practices around security, infrastructure, observability, and software architecture. This ensures our teams operate with a consistent, high-quality framework and stay aligned with modern standards, enabling us to continuously evolve and adapt as technologies and requirements change.
While every customer’s baseline is different, our managed services model is designed to drive efficiency across both technology and operations. We optimize costs in several ways: through strategic team locations, shared platform investments, and the economies of scale we gain as we onboard more services.
Because we support multiple customers, our aggregated usage strengthens our commercial position with key vendors such as AWS and observability providers. That scale helps us structure more efficient solutions and pricing over time. Beyond that, we continuously review the performance and architecture of each service at a granular level, ensuring it remains optimized for your unique requirements.
Our pricing model is transparent, with clear SLAs, defined scope, fair usage policies, and optional support fee caps. This gives you predictable budgeting while ensuring you always understand what’s included and how your service is being optimized.
Migration is one of the highest-risk parts of any OTT transformation, and we never treat it as a simple lift-and-shift. Our approach is built around detailed discovery, rigorous testing, and preparing for failure scenarios before they ever happen.
We follow a phased model: Assess → Mobilize → Migrate. That means mapping every workflow, dependency, and integration; performing deep technical discovery; and identifying risks such as data integrity issues, authentication failures, playback disruptions, or billing anomalies. For each of these, we define mitigation steps and clear rollback triggers upfront.
Before going live, we run dry migrations, validate data at database, backend, and end-to-end levels, and conduct fire-drill scenarios to train our teams on real failure modes. Multiple environments (lab, pre-prod, production) ensure that nothing reaches users without being stress-tested under realistic conditions.
During rollout, we use canary releases, real-time monitoring, and 24/7 incident readiness, with predefined communication and escalation paths to minimize user impact if something goes wrong.
This is only a high-level summary. For a deeper look at how Accedo manages complex migrations safely, check out this whitepaper “An Essential Guide to Strategic OTT Platform Migration” or talk to us directly.
We maintain continuous visibility through 24/7 monitoring and real-time dashboards, tracking performance, uptime, and error rates against jointly agreed KPIs. But metrics alone don’t tell the full story, so we also incorporate customer care data — reviewing user-reported issues and support trends to validate that the measured experience matches what viewers actually feel.
To keep quality consistently high, we run regular load tests, simulate live scenarios, and conduct post-event reviews to identify and resolve root causes. Quality is never static; we treat it as an ongoing, data-informed cycle of improvement across every platform.
We support all major platforms — web, mobile, smart TVs, and connected devices.
Our API-first, composable architecture allows us to integrate with a wide range of systems, including CDNs, analytics providers, payment gateways, and ad tech platforms.
We also maintain a set of pre-selected and pre-integrated vendors that we know well from an operational perspective, giving you a reliable starting point with proven performance. However, because we prioritize tailored architectures that match your specific business goals, we can integrate with new vendors as well — provided they pass our technical and operational assessment.
For major events, we activate dedicated war rooms with live monitoring, clear escalation paths, and direct communication channels. Our teams rely on detailed runbooks that are triggered by automated alerts, helping us reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) and respond consistently across all components of your architecture.
These runbooks are built and refined by us through regular fire-drill exercises, intentionally breaking parts of the system (APIs, cloud services, observability layers, and more) to ensure every scenario is covered. For critical events, we also activate our AWS countdown process, giving us access to an extended support team if needed.
Most importantly, MTTR commitments are included directly in our SLAs for high-priority events, so you always know the level of responsiveness you can expect.
Innovation is part of our managed services approach. While we optimize performance and stability behind the scenes, we also help you move the product forward. We analyze user engagement and churn patterns, run market-specific assessments, and review your marketing and content strategy to identify opportunities for growth.
From there, we propose an outcome-based product roadmap that aligns with your business goals. Our modular, extensible architecture and CI/CD pipelines make it easy to test and deploy new features quickly, so you can experiment confidently as your service evolves — whether that means exploring new monetization models or expanding to new platforms.
You always own your data. We provide full transparency through unified analytics and observability pipelines, giving you real-time insights into performance, usage, and viewer engagement. Your data never leaves your control, and we maintain strict compliance with privacy and security standards at all times.
We leverage AI across our managed services as a practical efficiency lever, focusing on three areas that deliver clear customer outcomes:
Velocity: AI helps us accelerate the software development and release cycle without compromising quality. This means new features and fixes reach your users sooner, with less operational overhead.
Quality & cost: We augment our observability with AI-driven issue analysis, allowing us to detect patterns earlier, pinpoint root causes faster, and reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution). The result is fewer incidents, quicker recovery when something breaks, and more efficient use of operational resources.
Innovation: AI also enables continuous, in-production optimization of user engagement, enabling us to test, learn, and improve user journeys in real time, which results in improving retention, engagement, and monetization outcomes for your service.
A major part of this is powered by Accedo Compose, our agentic-AI orchestration layer launched in September 2025. Compose runs modular “impact agents” that continuously learn from viewer behavior and service signals, then autonomously test and trigger improvements — from stabilizing quality to adapting UI flows or launching retention actions when churn risk rises. By integrating into our managed services, Compose helps shift operations from reactive support to continuous, real-time optimization.
At Accedo, our managed services model is built on transparency, deep expertise, and continuous evolution. Beyond running your operations, we help you scale confidently and deliver consistently great streaming experiences across every device.
Curious how this translates into real-world impact? We recently supported EXXEN (the fast-growing Turkish streaming service from ACUN MEDYA) on their journey to scale globally and strengthen their platform — you can read the full story here.
Ready to explore how managed services could transform your own OTT operations? Let’s talk.
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