Subscription Revenue (SVOD)
How it works
It's simple: gain enough viewers with free content and convert some of them to paying subscribers to your premium content. Once viewers see enough value in your media offerings, they will want to subscribe to your live-events, linear streams or on-demand archives.
Subscription revenue has been a leading monetization model for media publishers - especially for those who publish to multiple OTT / ConnectedTV platforms with their own proprietary TV Apps / Channels.
Subscribers who are willing to pay between $5 and $20 per month for access to your premium live-stream or on-demand content, will build up a growing, residual revenue stream for your media business and often keep their subscriptions active whether or not they view your content.
Typical challenges publishers face
Some OTT / ConnectedTV platforms offer their own subscription and payment processing for in-app transactions, usually at commission fees of 20-50% from all revenue your app generates.
Challenges with proprietary subscriber handling services of OTT platforms:
- increased app development costs for integration of each platform’s independent in-app transaction and payment system.
- Up to 50% of revenue held back by the platform as their revenue share.
- Revenue controlled by each platform
- Delayed payments
- No access to contact details of subscribers
- Most importantly: no central subscriber management for you and no central multi-device authentication for subscribers. This means: no “Netflix” experience. Instead each subscriber has to create multiple subscription accounts and make duplicate payments for each additional device they would like to use in order to access your premium content.
Lightcast.com Central Subscriber Processing System
Lightcast.com offers a OTT/Multi-Platform Subscriber Processing System, collecting a small setup fee for app-side integration, and a small transaction fee which covers all of the costs in the areas of billing, payment gateway, transactions, credit card fees, charge-back fees and penalties and other banking related fees, self-managed subscriber/customer accounts, security, your admin account with subscriber/customer overview, support, software and multi-platform authentication for users across all your TV apps, mobile apps and websites. This system ensures that there are no tiny drain holes to your revenue, and you know exactly what you “take home”. Your bottom line needs to be calculable and dependable. After all, your profit, your bottom line is what matters the most!
Advantages of Lightcast's OTT/Multi-Platform Subscriber Processing System:
- low startup costs due to ready-to-go system
- lower revenue share for payment processing
- real-time crediting and monitoring of your subscriber’s payments
- unlimited access to all your subscribers’ data
- monitor payments and manage all your subscribers from all platforms in one account
- Most importantly: a user-friendly “Netflix” experience for your subscribers. Your subscribers only need one subscription and are able to authenticate their active subscription across all devices and platforms you are offering an app and subscription-based content on.
- Subscribers can connect and manage all of their devices and their payment preferences within their subscriber accounts, provided by Lightcast.com .
