Monetization for OTT Platforms|Monetization for Streaming Services

Monetization for OTT Platforms or monetization for Streaming Services entails subscription billing, managing of concurrent logins and measurement and rating of data which is being streamed upstream or downstream by the streaming provider. The OTT plans sometimes have innovative packages whereby each plan controls the number of concurrent users, or a specialised or a premium package provides more access, information or viewing/listening rights. The OTT platforms require an enterprise scale billing and charging engine, the one that can be easily integrated.

EarnBill fits in easily within the landscape of the OTT billing platform. The diagram explains how the EarnBill’s OTT billing solution works behind the scenes.

As shown in the diagram, an OTT streaming platform could be handling thousands or millions of live sessions based on the subscriber base. These are all concurrent sessions which the OTT streaming platform is handling. EarnBills works as a backend billing engine for the OTT platform keeping track of subscription billing, one time and recurring payments, tracking the user concurrency and charging for the actual usage by each user session.

The OTT platform would write the usage from the live streaming to a file and process such a file with EarnBill’s rating engine. The OTT platform could also take advantage of EarnBill’s usage API and check if a session can be authorised to continue streaming. This feature is useful for tracking the number of concurrent logins.

This section discusses each of the EarnBill features that help with the OTT monetization:

• OTT Subscription Billing

EarnBill tracks and charges the plan subscription fees for the OTT platform on a recurring basis. Its recurring billing and subscription management features are ideal fit for the OTT monetization.

• One time and Recurring Payments

EarnBill provides a secure payment service with support of multiple payment gateways in various countries. This allows the OTT platform to choose and subscribe with the payment gateway of their choice. Carrying out secured one time and recurring payments, tracking them accurately, keeping the process simple yet very secured is a major need of an OTT platform to earn the user’s trust with their payment instruments (such as credit cards and bank accounts).

More the users trust the platform, the more they will choose to store their payment instruments with the platform to allow secured payments. This allows OTT platforms to grow their business and ensure good revenue collection and realisation, increasing the cash flow and a positive business outlook.

• Tracking User Concurrency for an OTT Platform

Many OTT platforms track the concurrent logins and even allow a certain number of concurrent logins from various devices in their higher plans. EarnBill helps restrict the concurrent sessions by tracking the streaming from different sessions, then flagging any additional sessions to halt streaming on an extra device.

• Usage Billing for OTT | Streaming Platform

The EarnBill Rating Engine receives the usage data regarding the upstream and downstream usage. The usage billing is not charged with every OTT platform, especially those related to video streaming. They rely for their charging on the subscription billing only. However, there are streaming platforms that measure and charge a very low fee for the upstream or downstream usage.

EarnBill relies on its billing mediation feature to support the ‘usage billing’ use cases for the OTT platforms. It has a robust and scalable architecture to handle high volumes. It also provides all the enterprise billing features such as ‘High Availability‘ to manage big deployments with a large subscriber base.

EarnBill is a robust, scalable, flexible and customisable billing platform which is ideally suited as an OTT Billing Solution or fits as a Billing Engine inside the OTT monetization Platform.

Check out our case study for an internet radio hosting company here: Rating Engine for a Radio Streaming Provider.