Showing posts with label web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web. Show all posts

Tuesday, 8 January 2013

WimTV: new ways to monetise events


Centuries of history have taught many ways to monetise events off line. And there are also many ways to monetise large events online.
However, on line monetisation of medium-to-small events is often a challenge: an in-house service has high set up and maintenance costs, administrative costs of managing payment collection may eat significantly into the revenues and, more than anything else, it is hard to create trusts between parties concurring to the event organisation and distribution.

These concerns are now a thing of the past.
WimLive, a service of the WimTV platform, lets operators decide whom they do business with while the service provides video streaming services to their customers and, more importantly, manages payment collection and revenue sharing.

Therefore WimTV offers the different components of the audio-visual world an environment where operators can interact and lets them create and deploy new business models in an immediate and profitable fashion. It is a web-based platform with B2B marketplace and B2C distribution functionality connecting  video professionals (creators, producers and service providers), advertisers and distributors.

WimTV promotes association of operators to provide the best choice to end users.

To achieve its goals WimLive introduces two professional figures that have a natural correspondence with comparable figures of the real world: Event Organiser, the figure that organises the event and Event Reseller the figure that promotes and distributes the event.

WimLive obviously supports the case of free streaming, but also the case of an Event Organiser playing also the role of Event Reseller and the case when the two entities are separat. This lets the Event Organiser to carry out the functions that are proper to the role while letting other operators play roles that are congenial to them.

WimTV administration pages let an Event Reseller (e.g. a local broadcaster) manage its event programming. For each event an Event Reseller can set various parameters (date, duration etc.) an particularly those agreed with the Event Organiser (this can be a band or a football team), namely ticket price and revenue sharing percentage. If more entities claim a slice of the pie WimLive is open to do that.

Leonardo Chiariglione, CEO of WimLabs, has stated “WimLive is a companion service to WimTV’s Video on Demand that already supports video streaming with a variety of business models such as free, pay-per-view and subscription. Any payment received by a user of WimTV services is immediately split among rights holders as driven by licensing information associated to each video. WimLive – adds Chiariglione – allows an Event Reseller, who has reached an agreement with an Event Organiser, to obtain from the WimTV platform a sharing of each individual payment.”

For each single payment received from an end user consuming an event, WimLabs withholds an agreed amount for its service and automatically accredits the agreed shares on the Event Reseller and Event Organisers’ PayPal accounts.

WimLive opens new opportunities to monetise events for which it was so far impossible to get an economic return that would not be offset by administrative costs. Indeed the entire event administration, including payment splitting, is managed by WimTV, a feature of vital importance to retain profitability of medium to small events.

Tuesday, 22 February 2011

Video on the web

Traditional Television is a consolidated business that exists since lots of years (¾ of a century). It is a complex environment, but it can be roughly divided in two blocks. The upstream block, made up of content producers, syndicators, distributors, and the downstream block: TV channels who distribute content to end users. The two blocks are well connected, and content produced by the upstream is licensed piece-by-piece to the downstream part of the environment.
In commercial TV, advertisers and ad agencies help feeding the chain that brings content from producers to end users by footing their bill.

Similarly, “video on the web” can be summarised as follows: an upstream block, typically made up of individual videomakers, provides content to the downstream block, who serves end users.
Unlike traditional TV, here there is a lot more content, more and more people watching it, but it looks like just a few players are making business to an extent that is largely unknown. A new web TV appears online, with 500 videos. End users start watching it, but after some time they want new content, and the web TV itself is not able to renew its catalogue so quickly. Some videos are self-produced, but not enough... How to find the right content providers for its audience? The up and downstream block are weakly connected, content producers are many but it is difficult to establish a relationship with them.
On top of that, web TVs that have a little audience are not appealing for advertisers, and for web TVs it is not easy to find other sources of revenue.

wim.tv is creating an alternative environment. In wim.tv there are content producers, syndicators, web TVs, advertisers, ad agencies and end users: both the upstream and downstream blocks exist.
Creators can upload their videos and license them to syndicators and web TVs, at their own conditions. Web TVs can easily find videos for their catalogues from creators and syndicators, thus reducing the cost of settling business relationships with content producers.
Advertisers can create their own video ad campaigns, define a target and find the right web TVs to reach it.
Every time a certain video ad is served by a web tv to an end user, the corresponding advertiser pays an amount, and remunerates all those who took part to the presentation of the ad to the end user (web tv, video creator, and intermediaries).
Riccardo Chiariglione

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

Behind the scene, the Web APIs

Once upon a time the web used to be a lot different. If you think about it for a second, you'd surely recall that just few years ago the web was all about emails, static web sites and file sharing (either legal or not) .
It's fascinating how much it evolved, and how close the web applications are getting to the old fashion applications you used to install on your laptop.
This was surely because of the evolution of the network itself (growing bigger and faster all over the world) but mainly because lately new paradigms (such as the ad Software as a Service and Web Service ones) came along opening a whole new prospective on how the software can be delivered.

The Wim.tv project started taking deeply in account those new paradigms and focused on delivering a rich user experience to both its business partner and to the consumer joining the platform. But it wasn't until recently that we started to implement a key feature to become successful web platform: a Web API.
When used in the context of web development, an API is typically a defined set of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages, along with a definition of the structure of response messages, which is usually in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. While "Web API" is virtually a synonym for web service, the recent trend (so-called Web 2.0) has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based services towards more direct Representational State Transfer (REST) style communications. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple services into new applications known as mashups . This is a key feature of modern web applications because it allows web developers to exploit the APIs in ways never even imagined by the API's development team itself, letting the web evolve. Wim.tv strongly believes in openness and interoperability and it's working hard to provide a simple and reliable Web API to allow other web developers to interact with the platform as much as possible and to integrate our technologies into their web applications.
Alberto Aresca