Pay-Per-View Streaming

This article is by Jose Alvear from Streaming Media News

One of the great conveniences of having cable TV is pay- per-view (PPV) programming. You can watch big Hollywood movies or sporting events all from the comfort of your easy chair. Nowadays, PPV programming is going beyond TV and into the Internet with streaming PPV. Although not a big market yet, streaming PPV is making some in-roads especially with sporting events. In fact the two biggest users of streaming PPV are the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and its competitor World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Between the two, they broadcast dozens of live Internet pay-per view events a year.

Music, another top draw with cable PPV viewers, can be a very powerful draw on the Internet as well. One recent streaming PPV event was an online benefit put together by Atlantic Records artist Tori Amos. She put together a collection of her music videos on the Internet, including a brand new never-before-released video. In order to see the new video, however, viewers had to make a contribution to RAINN, a charitable organisation she founded which assists victims of assault, abuse and domestic violence. According to RealNetworks (which hosted the benefit on its Real Broadcast Network broadcasting service), over 175,000 visitors came to the site and watched over 2,000 hours of streaming video.

One of the biggest drawbacks to streaming PPV is the low- quality video over the Internet. Stephen Condon, Vice President of Marketing at INTERVU says that with WWF or WCW events, quality is not the main issue. "You're getting the message, seeing what's going on, getting involved in the action," Condon says. "Some people will watch anything at any sort of quality just to be a part of the experience." Another benefit, he says is that you can watch something that you can't get any other way.

So why did the WWF decide to use streaming PPV? "The WWF invented PPV on cable in 1984," Michael Terretta, CTO at e-Media says, "and they were willing to be a market leader in PPV on the Internet because a percentage of their audience who would like to watch WWF pay per view events either (a) don't have an addressable converter or (b) their cable company doesn't provide it." In fact, surveys taken of viewers after PPV events showed that practically everyone buying and watching online could not get it through cable TV. That's why, Terretta says, Internet PPV has not hurt cable PPV sales.

Terretta was coy when asked if the WWF sees any profits but said that when they started this, they did not make money. "It was more an investment in a new technology to see if their users would adopt this technology to complement the traditional PPV." He did say that the WWF audience is growing 30% a month numbering somewhere "in the thousands". The Holyfield-Lewis boxing match had 25,000 viewers for the live event, he says.

Technologically speaking, implementation of a streaming PPV system is pretty straightforward. You need to add commerce software (to accept payments) plus a database to your regular streaming server. Of course one of the biggest customers of PPV events - off and on the Internet - is the adult entertainment industry. "Some adult businesses have been very curious about PPV technologies," says Terretta, "but we're not 100% sure that's an area we want to get into".

http://www.streamingmedia.net/

© ninfomania