# PPV and TVOD for OTT Platforms | Vodlix **Source:** https://vodlix.com/features/ppv-tvod **Summary:** Sell single titles without a subscription. Rent for a window or sell outright, paid from a wallet in two taps inside the app, with every sale recorded as an order. **Publisher:** Vodlix --- ## PPV & TVOD Sell a single title to somebody who will never take a subscription. Rent it for a window or sell it outright, paid from a wallet in two taps. - **Feature Plan:** 2 - core-platform - front-end ## 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. #### Two taps, inside the app 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. #### Rent for a window 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. #### Or sell it outright 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](/features/ott-monetization-models), and the enforcement behind them under [conditional access](/features/cas-user-control-manager). - mx-auto ### 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](/features/subscribers-manager), and the providers under [payment gateways](/features/payment-gateway-integrations). ### 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](/features/rental-purchases-manager) and the ledger is the [orders manager](/features/orders-manager). What sold, in which month, at what price, comes out of the [sales dashboard](/features/sales-dashboard) rather than out of a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand. **Q: What is the difference between PPV and TVOD?** They describe the same commercial idea from different traditions. Pay per view comes from broadcast, where you bought access to one event. Transactional video on demand is the streaming term for buying or renting one title. In both cases the viewer pays for a single thing rather than for a subscription. **Q: Can I sell single titles without running subscriptions at all?** Yes. Transactional selling works on its own, and for some catalogues it is the whole business. It also runs alongside subscriptions and advertising, so a title can be included in a plan for subscribers and purchasable by everybody else at the same time. **Q: What is the difference between renting and buying for the viewer?** A rental gives unlimited views for a set window and then access closes. A purchase has no expiry, so it survives a new device, a reinstall and a lapsed subscription. Making that distinction obvious before somebody pays is the single best way to avoid refund requests. **Q: Can viewers pay without entering card details every time?** Yes, through a wallet balance. They top it up once and after that a purchase is a confirmation rather than a form. That matters everywhere and it matters enormously in markets where card ownership is low, because people can add funds the way they already pay for other things. **Q: Does the purchase happen inside the app?** It does, on the title the viewer is already looking at. Sending somebody out to a browser to complete a payment is where most transactional sales quietly disappear, so the flow is deliberately kept to a couple of taps in the app. **Q: What stops somebody sharing a title they bought?** Entitlement is checked when a stream is requested rather than being held by the app, and a transactional order carries its own limit on how many screens it opens on. That is the same mechanism that protects subscription content, applied to a single purchase. **Q: What happens if a viewer wants a refund?** The refund is recorded against the order and the order is kept rather than deleted, so the history reads correctly afterwards. That matters when a card dispute arrives months later and you need to show what was taken and what was given back. **Q: Can I price different titles differently?** Yes. Pricing sits on the title, so a new release and a back catalogue film do not have to cost the same, and a rental and a purchase can be priced independently of each other. That is how most transactional catalogues actually work.