Pay-per-view for Nimble Streamer

Nimble Streamer is a product made for streaming business of any size, starting from the smallest start-up companies. Most of them want to monetize their media in all possible ways so after a while we implemented a feature set which we call pay-per-view (PPV) for Nimble Streamer.

What are the use cases for this kind of functionality?

• pay per view logic for streaming media providers: each user's connection is tracked;
• pay per minute logic: view time per viewer is gathered separately;
• re-streaming protection when 1 person pays for 1 account and provides access for group of people: just block the one who is breaking your terms of use;
• unique visitors statistics calculation: you may collect and show real-time and daily statistics;
• education video management for per-student metrics;
• you name it.

So it's a good foundation for creating paywalls.

Let's see how it works.

The main workflow is based on push API. Nimble Streamers sends (pushes) user data to customer, then customer decides what to do with each individual unique user and replies with the decision back to the agent. This works as follows:

1. Customer implements API handler that is able to accept POST requests.
2. Customer adds pay-per-view signature into existing media links, with primarily a unique ID for each of his clients.
3. WMSPanel provides web UI for setting up handler URL and some other parameters.
4. Nimble Streamer sends request to handler on a periodical basis which is defined via web UI. Sync contains all users' IDs, IPs, view time delta and media names.
5. Customer handler makes required decisions based on company business logic and sends response to Nimble. This response specifies which users must be blocked from watching media.
6. Blocked users are shut down immediately, while others keep watching.
7. All Nimble Streamers will send sync-ups to the same single API handler.

Paywall pay-per-view based on Nimble Streamer.

Further setup

Please read our web site section describing Pay-per-view set up with pictures and code samples.

You can also read "The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming" by Thomas Gires to see real-life example of using pay-per-view feature set.

Next

This feature set requires changes in customer business logic and proper set up at WMSPanel. This is why we're looking forward to seeing your feedback, questions and comments. Send us your code snippets so we could check them and propose improvements.

If you need more protection for HLS, please consider using HLS AES-128 DRM encryption supported by Nimble.

Contact us if you have anything to say regarding this feature set.

Related documentation

Nimble HTTP Streamer, Nimble Streamer overview video, Streaming VOD with Nimble Streamer, HLS re-streaming set up, Smooth Streaming support, Nimble Streamer HTTP hotlinking protection, Hotlinking protection with stream-based signature, Nimble Streamer geo-location restriction, Calculating HLS statistics, Pay-per-view for Nimble, Paywall for Wowza, Pay-per-view for Wowza Media Server,