Billing Models

MediaKey supports many different billing models. This enables you to choose the model that is tailored to your services.

• Subscriptions
• Pay per view (PPV)
• Prepaid minutes
• Micropayments
• Promotion
• Rental
• Existing Memberarea

Subscriptions
The subscription model works for content owners who wants to establish a longer relationship with their customers by offering collections of content for extended viewing periods. The content owner bundles a selection of content files that are packaged together and defined by a single SKU. The customer is then given access to the files within this SKU for a predefined time-period. The subscription ends when the customer's access expires regardless of whether all content has been viewed.


Pay per view (PPV)
The pay per view model is similar to a standard rental store program, which allows a customer to view a piece of content for a specified time-period. The content owner can grant single or multiple access to the content within a time-period. The license automatically expires once the timeframe ends and further access to the content is denied.


Prepaid minutes
Prepaid minutes enable users to skip the payment step each time they play a media by purchasing in advance. When prepaid minutes run out, MediaKey automatically stops the playing and provides users with opportunity to instantly purchase more minutes. With prepaid minutes you avoid the small unprofitable charges.


Micropayments
When a customer uses Mediakey.com for the first time an account is opened where a minimum of $10 is deposited. You are able to monetize your media and give the customer access to buying music or videos for as low as 25 cents.

If you sell albums you can also give the customer the freedom of choice and pay for an entire album instead.

Transactions are grouped by MediaKey so you avoid the expensive small charges with high processing fee.


Promotion
The promotional model is supported in various ways. The first one requires the customer to provide a MediaTicket you have given him. The second requires the customer to view ads and the last makes the customer fill out a questionnarie before being able to play the movie.

1. MediaKey supports MediaTickets which means you can issue a token to a customer and grant him access to the movie a certain number of times. You can then control what the customer needs to do in order to get a MediaTicket.
   
   
2. Next you can choose a URL that is shown to the customer before being able to play the movie. This means you get a lot of advertising from distributing your content freely on P2P networks etc.
   
   
3. At last you can define a questionnarie. Your customers needs to fill it out in order to be able to play your media.

Rental
As with a normal video rental shop, you can also limit the viewing of a movie to a certain rental period. You might wish to rent out a video for 7 days, whereafter the video needs to be rented again.

This means customers can afford to view more movies and if they find a movie favourite, they can rent it multiple times. Rental period is ofcourse variable and can be set to anything from 1 hour to several years.


Existing Memberarea
You might have an existing memberarea with subscribers. With the help of MediaKey you will be able to encrypt your media and ensure that a customers can only play a downloaded movie if he provides a valid username and password to your existing memberarea.

This brings along a good oppertunity to increase membership retention, because customers can no longer play the downloaded movies after their membership expires. Instead they are presented with a singup-link, insuring you the maximum gain from your downloaded media.

It works by authorizing against your current memberarea. This way a customer needs to provide a valid username and password to your memberarea before he can play a downloaded movie.