Showing posts with label wimtv. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wimtv. 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.

Monday, 10 September 2012

WimLive – live streaming that makes economic sense


With WimLive the WimTV platform makes available another service to WimTV users: the ability to offer live streaming services with a simple way to get paid for the service, possibly in combination with other parties.

Off line monetization of events has never been a problem. Also on line monetization of large scale events is not a problem. However, on line monetization of medium-to-small scale live events is an uphill battle because:
1. Setting up and maintain a live streaming service may entail significant costs
2. The cost of collecting payments may easily offset the revenues
3. If more parties are involved it may be difficult to establish trusts between parties.

WimLive has solved these problems. Let’s follow a simple yet quite realistic walkthrough by looking at the picture below.




As you can see, everyone can stream own live events independently, deciding whether to transmit to his audience for free or in pay-per-view mode. In addiction, the system also offers the possibility of make live streaming in cooperation with other entities, dividing the proceeds among all participants. In particular:


1. An Event Organiser holding rights to an event makes an agreement with an Event Reseller to promote and distribute events to end users and agree on revenue sharing (this step is not needed if there is no Event Reseller)
2. The event takes places and a cameraman shoots the scene and sends the digital stream to WimTV
3. An end user clicks on the event, pays and watches the event
4. The payment is split between WimTV and Event Organiser
5. Payments are split also with the Event Reseller in case promotion and distribution is done by a third party.

WimLive is a Unified solution for on demand and live video where
- An arbitrary number of parties may claim rights to event
- Revenues are accredited to each party as soon as payments are effected
- WimTV plays the role of trusted third party
- WimLive entails very low administrative costs
- Can be easily integrated with other application platforms (Moodle…)

Who are the typical WimLive users?
1. Hotel chains
2. Organisers of cultural, musical and sport events
3. Companies offering training courses
4. Small to medium size film makers
5. Local TVs
6. And many more...

To run a WimLive event you need to 
1. Register on WimTV as a WebTV
2. Sending an email to sales@wimlabs.com to get a URL
3. Input a few data (date, time, duration, price to watch the event etc.)
4. And go!

Monday, 4 June 2012

Earnings for all with WimTV


WimTV is an ICT platform designed to support an ecosystem of players dealing with digital content.
In such an ecosystem you seldom find that a relationship is confined between two players, bearing in mind that WimLabs, the company operating WimTV itself is a platform player.

So far WimTV supported multi-party relationships using its Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) “currency” WimCent. But with the recently released v1.0, WimTV is making one step in the direction of supporting business that is based on real currencies.
Do you own valuable video content that you want to monetise in a secure environment? WimTV v1.0 is the solution for you.

You can upload your videos to your private space MyMedia” and attach some descriptions to make them more marketable. Then you can open your WebTV on WimTV – the entry level with a limited degree of customisation or the advanced level with a high degree of customisation – post your “streaming-ready” videos on MyStreamingMedia attaching a price for Pay per View consumption or defining your own bundles of videos for subscription consumption.

Your customers will enjoy your content with the very robust WimTV player, a plug-in that works on Linux, Mac and Windows for the Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari browsers and 50% of each Pay per View or subscription payment received by WimTV will immediately be accredited to your PayPal account.
Playing the role of video publisher is not for all. You can be an excellent producer of video content but be poor at marketing it.
Conversely you may be an excellent publisher but be a poor content producer. Can WimTV help?

Well, not yet, at least not if you want to play with real money. This is what WimLabs has reserved for WimTV v1.1. Creators of video content will be able to post their videos for sale and WebTVs will be able to purchase videos posted for sale on a Creator’s shop.
Whenever a video posted by Creator A, purchased by WebTV B at, say 30% revenue sharing, will be watched by End User C, WimTV will automatically split the payment made by End User C to Creator A, WebTV B and WimLabs.
WimTV1.0 is just the first of a series of steps that will convert the idea of content monetisation on the web from words to reality.

Leonardo Chiariglione

Tuesday, 15 February 2011

The cross-browser challenge

Web standards have been growing fast thanks to the World Wide Web Consotrium and the community around it. It's amazing to see what a browser can do with a few lines of html and javascript. But.. What if you need to deliver a new feature to users and you can't implement it using current web standards ?

This often means you will have to develop your own "browser plugin" using native code. What you would like is to have a plugin that runs on every browser, on every operating system, on every hardware architecture.

In order to deliver encrypted RTSP content inside user's browser, WimTV had to face (and is facing) the very same problems. Just like Adobe Flash we had to implement our own piece of software that runs side by side with the browser, rendering contents in a child window.

While there are a lot of browsers available, it's is possible to group them by the rendering engine they use.

- Webkit: Chrome, Safari, Android Mobile Browser, many others
- Gecko: Firefox, Camino
- Trident: Internet Explorer, other Microsoft products

Luckly most Webkit and Gecko browsers implement NPAPI for their plugins.

NPAPI is a cross-platform plugin architecture that was introduced by Netscape and then received many contributions by Mozilla and Google. Basically it defines a set of APIs that must be implemented on both browser and plugin side in order for them to interact. Mozilla currently offers the best SDK and documentation to help developers write their plugins using C or C++.

WimTV Browser Plugin uses NPAPI to support Webkit and Gecko powered browsers, and a NPAPI-ACTIVEX wrapper in order to work on Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The wrapper is called PluginHostController. It is opensource and the code is available from Mozilla servers. It consist of an ActiveX plugin written in C++ and implementing some basic funcions of NPAPI. Unfortunately it was written some years ago and it is not maintained. In the meantime NPAPI evolved adding some features we used in our plugin, such as Scriptable APIs allowing Javascript interaction. In order to use it we had to develop the missing parts and then bundle wrapper and plugin inside a cab file.
Davide Bertola