We are in a strange era with some of the largest media companies pulling out of streaming video, namely Stage6, 'voluntary' shutting down (after loosing 12 million USD in 12 months), Google Video halting uploading and some pretty major implosions such as Veoh burning through 70 Million USD and filling for bankruptcy, to name just a few.

The obvious problem here is that the video terrain is a very difficult one to make money from, given the CPM from advertising in this vertical is so low (almost worthless) and bandwidth costs are simply so high.

I have personally had plenty of my own struggles in this sector with Doc-Film-Net (a documentary film streaming porthole for controversial documentaries) which has been put on death watch numerous times as one CDN after another pulled the rug from underneath it (having offered free bandwidth then relinquished). Ultimately in order to survive it had to pay its own way and hence I was forced to explore every possible payment method to pay Highwinds the new CDN.

In my trials I experimented for a long time with pay per view, which was extremely disappointing since I found when the content is behind a pay wall, viewers simply did not miss what they had never seen and would not pay even small fees. In this model there was no pain being alleviated, as this New York Newspaper discovered too!

This got me to thinking long and hard and inspired this post on my own blog: Painful Ways To Make Money Out Of Free which led me to experiment with a Megavideo style payment system, in this system viewers are allowed limited free daily viewing time (60 minutes) and are then cut off and required to pay for unrestricted access.

I then developed a similar concept for Doc-Film-Net where users where allowed limited daily viewing access but had to pay for more than 60 minutes and the results were extremely encouraging, so much so that sales increased over those pay-per-view trials by about 90%. The reason being simply that people didn't miss what they never had and only usually pay for something once they are hooked on it (crack). Needless to say with the new limited viewing system in place Doc-Film-Net is now no longer on life support and is accruing healthy profits!

Enter The New Flash 'Payer' Application:

This has led to the development of a third party plugin & application for all video providers with the same dilemma where they can offer this feature on their own sites, it has more features and is fully customizable. It's called the 'Flash Payer' and is now being provided by Karsa.co.uk. Video content providers can now use this widget and application to charge for their content in the same way, setting their own price points and limits.