Making Money with Streaming Media

Give Your Customer’s Content Away For Free
Huh? I know I just told you above to sell your customer’s content and make money right? Like I said this isn’t a conventional space so maybe your customer doesn’t want to sell their content. That’s fine. But wait, they may not want to REALLY give it away for free… not considering what is available in return.

Maybe they want to increase their branding using a piece of leased content or maybe they want to put a message out about a new product using more viral means or maybe they want to just collect email addresses for a future campaign.

Regardless of the situation, let’s face it, people are willing to give out their email address to get something they want which is why most Netizens have 2 or more email addresses. So keep your customer’s users in touch and start building your customer a list to market to. If anything they will get invaluable marketing research at low cost with instant uptime.

Step One: You Need Some Eye Candy. Get some short and legal content that your customer owns and can be used for the job at hand. It could be a trailer or maybe it’s the commercial they spent all that money on during the Super Bowl or maybe it’s a music video that one of your customer’s artists just spent their last 20K on. Maybe it’s that funny voicemail left on your technical support line at 0200 AM on Sunday. Either way make sure it’s encoded in broadband 300K or higher and the audio is crisp and clean. Every bit helps.

Step Two: Create and Compel. It’s just an email address but your users want to be courted a bit so make it original. Take a marketing slogan or product theme or inside joke and make a simple pitch in HTML. Using WMT DRM you can then give this pitch to your DRM provider and they are able to embed this marketing message or branding in the initial window that pops up when a user wants to access this file. In your pitch the user can be instructed to enter their email address or choose their sex or pick their age. All of this information is collected by the DRM Service Provider and should be available to you online within near real-time. Failed attempts due to invalid emails or responses can be re-directed to a catch all site.

Step Three: Cast The Net. Since your customer’s content is locked at the file-level it can be delivered to end-users many different ways. These include using conventional streaming media delivery techniques, ad-hoc CDN services that combined CDN and P2P, straight P2P channels, email, web download and more. There are no boundaries now and for your customer, they get instant feedback as the content is accessed. In fact, your customer can even encourage end-users to recommend and forward on their content in effect becoming the transmission medium and increasing the reach of the brand.

Step Four: Add It All Up. Once your customer has run their campaign and reviewed all of the data collected they can better understand what type of audience is interested in their brand and the composition of this audience. Using this data, they can then compile better pitch opportunities for their sponsors or partners or internal customers. There’s nothing better than hard data and file-level DRM provides the most accurate look possible at your user in real-time.

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