Pay-per-view online video requirements

There are many misconceptions about pay per view video online and what is actually needed to be successful in such a business. I’ll try to highlight some of my thoughts on this type of business and the technology required to make it work. You can’t just throw some half baked PPV solution and get to the masses without much of a commitment.

The ppv content

You need to have content that can be sold online. For example you can sell online movies, TV series, TV Shows and Video Guides, however you can’t really sell news or personal video. So in the first place you need to have the proper type of content. A good point of why it is hard to actually obtain content for a PPV business scheme is presented in Mark Cuban’s Blog.

Proper audience targeting

Some types of content require a certain concept in audience targeting. For example you can sell successfuly “flash guides” from your personal blog, but you’ll usually need a proper portal site to sell BlockBuster movies online.

Content protection (DRM)

It is paid content so it is supposed to be protected and accessed through the intended interface. Your videos should not be accessible outside of your system. This requirement however can be sacrificed to some extent in favour of ease of use.

Ease of use

This is probably the most important part of a successful pay-per-view business. Your system should allow easy selection, easy payment and easy view of the content. These are the only required steps to it and they should be easy by themselves. Registration, pre-payment/subscription and email communication are NOT part of the “ease of use” goal.

Quality of the video service

As pay-per-view is paid service, video quality is supposed to be “higher” than the usual on the web. Unless it is a video source limitation (often found in documentals) the video resolution and bitrate should be at least near HD. As I have written before true HD video is not yet feasible on the web, but a good bitrate 405p video stream should be achievable in most cases.  Besides quality there are two other factors concerning quality of video service these are  server access and speed. Server access is a cumulative factor of access time and reliability of connections concerning your targeted audience. And server speed is a cumulative criteria of capacity and peak usage handling of the video network.