The last few months have seen streaming apps expand into new formats, from short-form video to gaming offerings. But Michael Akkerman, Chief Business Officer at DT (and former GM of Advertising at Uber), argues that platforms need to serve their audience rather than expect them to follow the app into a new behaviour.
The world’s biggest entertainment platforms are becoming more ambitious. Netflix is moving beyond film and TV into gaming and live programming, while Spotify, TikTok and YouTube are broadening their offers across audio, video, shopping and live experiences. The lines between entertainment categories are rapidly disappearing.
It is easy to see why. More formats mean more reasons to open an app and more opportunities to engage more people. But there is a point where adding more starts to blur what a platform’s core use case is.
The route from specialised service to entertainment super app is not to copy every successful format from every competitor. Platforms need to master the experience that made audiences choose them, then expand into areas that feel like a natural extension of that relationship. In other words, they need to earn the right to grow.
Strong foundations create permission to expand
Successful platforms are built around clear user expectations. People open Spotify to listen, TikTok to scroll and Netflix to watch. That clarity creates habit and shapes the identity of the brand.
Expansion can work when it builds on that existing behaviour. YouTube Shorts is a good example; another way for creators and audiences to interact within an existing video ecosystem. According to YouTube, Shorts now averages more than 200 billion daily views.
Other moves have been harder. Early in Netflix’s gaming push, third-party analysis from Apptopia suggested that less than 1 percent of its subscribers were playing its mobile games each day. Netflix has continued to invest, but the early result illustrated a wider point: an existing audience does not automatically follow a platform into a new behaviour.
That is probably the more useful question for platforms to ask; not “what format should we add next?”, but “why would our existing audience want this from us?”
Expand with the audience, not at them
I saw this tension firsthand during my time at Uber. The business had two distinct apps solving two distinct problems – one for getting a ride and another for ordering food. Both were immediate, location-led services, but the experiences themselves were fundamentally different. The question was always, how much sense does it make to put both into one environment?
Uber’s answer has, in part, been a halfway point; making Rides accessible from Eats and Eats accessible from the Uber app, while maintaining experiences designed around different user intentions.
That contrasts with the super-app model seen in China, where significantly more services can live inside a single environment. The US market remains much more fragmented and specialised.
It is almost the difference between football (soccer) and American football. In football, any player might run the length of the pitch and score. In American football, individual players are trained to go an inch wide and a mile deep in one highly specialised role. You would not ask a 320-pound defensive lineman to become your kicker simply because they are already on the team.
Entertainment platforms face the same test. A music service should ask how video strengthens discovery or fandom, rather than adding it simply because video captures attention elsewhere. A streaming platform should not enter gaming purely because gaming is growing. It needs to understand what kind of gaming experience would feel relevant to its viewers. The strongest platforms will grow with their audiences rather than trying to turn them into someone else’s.
AI should be a compass
This is where AI becomes useful. There has been a lot of focus on AI-generated content and conversational interfaces, but the more interesting application is understanding what audiences actually want next. Someone opening an app for five minutes on a commute is in a different mindset from someone looking for something to watch for two hours in the evening. Better personalisation can help platforms understand those differences and work out which new experiences genuinely fit.
That also matters outside the app itself. The device is already the place where all of these entertainment experiences come together, which creates opportunities to surface something relevant at the moment a user is most likely to want it. DT recently tested this principle with games developer Playrix. We found that 97 percent of dynamic installs were incremental, and users were more than 40 times as likely to open an app when it surfaced directly on their device.
As entertainment platforms broaden their offering, they need to be careful not to lose the paramount reason people chose them in the first place. There is nothing wrong with wanting to become more. But the strongest platforms will be the ones that expand from a position of strength, rather than adding features because everyone else has them.
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