WordPress Paywall/subscription service

[vintagefilm]

do you guys have a recommendation for a paywall plugin for WordPress that will work with S3B for both site-wide access and specific pay per title/ppv?

[drafizan]

i use woocommerce membership and woocommerce subscription for my project. quite pricey though since our currency is currently worth sh**.

[vintagefilm]

Thanks for that-WooCommerce. It looks like their subscription plugin might work for what we are doing. Our site will be a Netflix/Amazon Prime type of subscription service. I am new to WordPress, coming from the Joomla world. I am hoping to understand the integration between S3bubble and the paywall application. I think I saw in one of the videos that S3B was building ? maybe, a paywall solution into the S3B world. So I was hoping to here specifics about that, or any other recommendations. Based on the way the S3B plugin embeds the video into pages, it seems that perhaps any paywall that restricts access to those pages may work. But it is a bit unclear to me at this point.

[s3bubble]

Hi vintagefilm,

You can find out more about payment integration here.

Best Regards

Sam

[vintagefilm]

Sam, thanks so much for these two videos on Streamium and the paywall solution. The videos answered all of my questions. Time to switch from Joomla to WordPress. Another learning curve<smile>

I will ask another question in another thread!

Grace McKay
VintageFilmChannel

[vintagefilm]

But wait, there’s more. I have a followup question.

How is the Preview function in the player supposed to integrate with the paywall? If you set the preview to play for a minute and stop and display the overlay link, I am assuming the link should be to the paywall/plan page. And if a purchase is made, the player then allows playback of the entire movie, or access to whatever the plan permits. Is this functionality already builtin to s3bubble? If not, how do you see it being implemented?

If this doesn’t work this way, we could build a duplicate site as a sub-domain for the previews and the link could go to the paywall on the main site. But this will be double the work obviously, so not ideal.

Could the preview function set an in-point for play back, either at the beginning of the movie, or at some other point? For my old movies, starting after the opening credits would be more enticing as a preview.

Thanks Sam

Grace McKay
VintageFilmChannel

[s3bubble]

Hi Grace,

The preview does not currently integrate with the paywall but I can suggest a couple of things other users are doing.

You can supply a really low bitrate stream for users that have not paid only 240p and then ask them to upgrade for better quality.

You could have a really annoying watermark to force users to make payment. S3Bubble add watermarks

You can have a category called freebies where you can have your videos with the preview set.

But you make a valid point and we are adding updates to the Streamium theme weekly so we are really interested in what our users think is the best way to entice users to sign up.

So anyone else please jump in on this topic we would like as much advice as possible.

It would be great to have a list of possible scenarios Netflix and Amazon prime Now TV etc all offer trial periods which works great if you have tonnes of updated content.

I would suggest creating a category like suggested and give every video in that category a preview.

Best Regards

Sam

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by s3bubble.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by s3bubble.

[vintagefilm]

It seems like the Previews as a category is a great idea, but still would require a separate preview video, not the full length movie with the preview option set. Because the preview is set at the player, if set, it could not be used for the full length playback, right?

I have always thought that we would need to create separate files for the preview, but seeing your preview function, I thought you may have an option we could use instead.

In our business model, we are selling site-wide access to all of the films, like Netflix. Others probably want to use the Amazon model, with site-wide access for some films, but with the option to sell access to premium films as a separate item. To do this, it seems you still would need a separate preview with the preview link set at the end, and let the link take you to a sell page with the options for a subscription to the site, and an option to buy the specific video you previewed. It doesn’t seem likely that this is a template function, but maybe could be created using WordPress pages or posts. can you imagine anyway to implement this type of workflow?

Grace
VFC

[vintagefilm]

Just had a thought. If we need to make separate preview files, maybe we should just put them on Youtube and use whatever discovery happens to draw viewers to the site. they could be embedded in the sell page on the site.

Does anyone have a live site that they can show us for examples? What does your business model and workflow look like?

Grace
VFC

[s3bubble]

Hi vintagefilm,

So just picking back up on this post we have implemented some changes to the Streamium theme which you can see here.

http://streamiumtheme.com/

As you should notice we have set certain plans for a specific video that can only be viewed after sign up this seems like a good way to give some free content but also entice users to sign up.

We have also changed the way the details work so we can display more information about the film.

Let me know if you would like us to help integrate these new changes into your website?

Best Regards

Sam

[vintagefilm]

I love that! yes I would love it if you could apply the changes. you need admin access right? where can I sent it? the site is vintagefilmchannel.com. oops, of course, you already know that.

Could I ask another template question? when you visit my site you will see that Streamium is not kind to my images. can you give some guidance on how to how to adjust the size of the rotating banner so my images are not destroyed? Also, the video playback pages– I would love it if there were ioptions to open the player at the video resolution instead of full screen, so it is viewers choice about playback size. these old films can scale sort of, but sometimes it is not pretty.

Grace
VFC

[s3bubble]

Hi Vintagefilm,

We have updated your setup.

https://vintagefilmchannel.com/

Best Regards

Sam

[s3bubble]

Hi vintagefilm,

Yes if you could set us up with an Admin login and send the details to support@S3bubble.com we can login and apply the updates.

Regarding images, everything is setup at a 16/9 ratio so we normally use this calculator

http://size43.com/jqueryVideoTool.html

And start with width 1080 height 608 this seems to be the best settings for quality we have WordPress functions that resize the images for the smaller sizes to keep the browser happy so start with a nice large 1080×608 photoshop template and resize appropriately.

Best Regards

Sam

[vintagefilm]

I wanted to give a little followup feedback this morning. First, I like the changes to the template, and really appreciate that video you made explaining the set up. The membership link in the thumbnail is very interesting. I managed to screw up the membership plugin settings, but I think I can work through it. The inline/popup preview of the films is interesting as well. I like it popping up the preview without loading the player page. This all looks like and feels Netflix online. My normal Netflix viewing in through a roku, which is different than Netflix online. This change seems to work just like Netflix online if I enable auto-play. Except Netflix online, at least here in the US, there is no header image carousel. Is there a way to completely eliminate the carousel in Streamium?

And here is a completely separate question related to our chosen Paywall. The back-end workflow seems really clumsy if every purchase has to have direct admin approval before the purchase is complete. Is this possible to automate, within Subscriptio, or perhaps with a different Paywall?

[s3bubble]

Hi Vintagefilm,

Yes totally agree the process needs to be automated we are looking into this should have an update shortly.

If you only want one image in the carousel you just need to make sure there is only one post set to sticky go to post and look for sticky posts.

Best Regards

Sam

[vintagefilm]

my best case, if we cannot modify the carousel to handle the images at a smaller size(864×486 is ideal for us) is to eliminate it completely. It is so big on most displays that only one row of thumbnails is visible before scrolling down. the look of it seems out of proportion. Have a close look at netflix on a roku. they are showing 95% of the 16×9 image, with a very thin fade on the left into the text area. this allows enough room at the bottom for two rows of thumbnails, which is very desirable. The other cool thing with netflix on Roku is that the previews autoplay in the top area where the carousel is. but they don’t do that on their website only the roku app. I haven’t looked at it on Chromecast yet, not sure what that looks like.

Good luck on solving the paywall workflow. that will be a major improvement.

Best,
Grace
VFC

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