- Features
- PPV & TVOD
Some People Will Never Subscribe. Sell to Them Anyway.
Pay per view and transactional video on demand let a viewer buy one thing without joining anything. Rent it for a window or own it permanently, with the whole purchase happening inside the app in a couple of taps.
A Subscription Asks for a Relationship. Some People Want a Transaction.
There is a large group of viewers who will happily pay you and will never subscribe. They want the one film everybody is talking about, or the fight on Saturday, and they do not want a monthly commitment they will forget to cancel. A platform that only sells subscriptions treats every one of those people as a failure. Selling a single title costs you nothing you were not already doing, because the catalogue, the player and the payment methods already exist. What changes is that somebody who was never going to convert becomes revenue rather than a bounce. It also works the other direction. A viewer who buys once has told you something about their taste, and buying again is easier than buying the first time.
The purchase happens where the viewer already is, paid from a wallet balance without leaving for a checkout page. Sending somebody to a browser to pay is where most transactional sales are lost.
A rental grants unlimited views for a set period rather than a single play, which is what people actually expect and what stops a paused film turning into a support ticket.
A purchase has no expiry, so the entitlement survives a new device, a reinstall and a subscription that lapsed years later. It was bought, not borrowed.
Rent and Buy Are Different Promises
The two look similar on a price list and behave nothing alike afterwards. A rental is a window, and everything about how you present it should make that obvious before the money moves, because the complaints come from people who thought they had bought something. A purchase carries no expiry at all, which means the platform has to honour it long after the transaction is forgotten, on a device that did not exist when the sale happened. That is the harder promise, and it is the reason entitlement is checked at the stream rather than stored in an app. Both models run alongside subscriptions rather than instead of them, so the same title can be included for a subscriber and purchasable by everybody else. How the three fit together is set out in monetization models, and the enforcement behind them under conditional access.
The Wallet Is Why the Second Purchase Happens
Asking for card details is the most expensive moment in any transaction, and asking for them every time is how a service ends up with a lot of first purchases and very few second ones. A wallet balance turns the second sale into a confirmation. A viewer tops up once, through whichever provider suits their market, and after that buying a film is a tap rather than a form. In places where card ownership is low this is not a convenience, it is the difference between having a transactional business and not having one, because people can add money the way they already pay for everything else. The balance and the ledger behind it are described under the subscribers manager, and the providers under payment gateways.
What Happens After the Money Moves
Every purchase creates an order, and that order is what you rely on when somebody writes in three weeks later. It records what was bought, what it cost, which provider handled it and whether it was refunded, which turns most billing questions into a lookup rather than an investigation. Rentals carry their window on the order too, so the question of whether somebody still has access has a factual answer rather than an argument. The admin side of that is rentals and purchases and the ledger is the orders manager. What sold, in which month, at what price, comes out of the sales dashboard rather than out of a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand.
Frequently Asked Questions
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