Members area "tickets"?
 

I have a niche paysite.

I have around a dozen movies so far, about an hour in length each broken into 5 minute segments.

Since it looks to me like the majority of my members have cable or dsl, members tend to join, download the whole site, and then cancel the recuriing. Then they come back a couple months later and join and get the new batch.

To try to maximize profit, I have been rotating the content. This tends to loose the rebills too, as they look around and don't see all that much.

To try for better retention, I am programming a member's "ticket system". The way this works is, the member gets a menu of all the movies avaialble. Then they can get up to 4 "tickets" a month to watch 4 1 hour movies, whichever ones they want.

The way I have programmed it so far, I track forever their "tickets" so retaining members can watch as many times as they want past movie selections, but get only an average of 1 a week of new movies.

I'm about ready to go live with this.

Any downsides anybody can think of? Seems like it will make the sufers happy, but I'd be intrested in hearing opinions.

i am trying to get an understanding,,

but i think i better idea is to make those movies
unavailable if the member cancels

Sounds good but if you swap out a movie that the customer paid for only a few days or so after he paid for it, that will result in one very unhappy customer if he needs to purchase another ticket.

Just my :2 cents:

That is correct - I didn't say it right. The whole area is still protected by .htaccess, so no membership = no movies. But if select a ticket, as long as you have that some membership you can always watch that movie again, or of course you can download it.

The idea is now I never swap out anything. If you select movie "12" you can watch it every day for the rest of your life, as long as you retain.

Why not throttle bandwidth or limit the max amount the person can download a day? Much easier.
ZoiNk

the downside is how much work will it be involved encoding all the movies

I thought about throttling, but thats not really my intent. Believe it or not some members watch the same movie 6 times. Don't watnt it on their hard drives, I guess.

I don't have to change any encoding. Just front end the members are with some PHP to access.

I hate speeding tickets

tough call, i see what you're trying to prevent but 4 movies a month might seem pretty skimpy to some members. Members who can go join AdultBouncer and watch lord knows how many movies, yes most stolen, but surfer doesn't give a shit about that.

if your stuff is really niche and exclusive hopefully enough fans will keep supporting you if you restrict them to 4 movies a month.

this is the reason I despise Bouncer and DeluxePass, they make life friggin tougher for guys like you who shoot or buy exclusive movie content.

sounds pretty easy to code, and pretty effective.