You’ve built a nice little membership site and now you would like to serve what all the other up-and-coming pay sites have: Movies! So, what are your options? Well, you can always cut costs by making your own. Let us walk through a possible scenario of getting from point A to point B of what you could expect to encounter with streaming your own video content…Making Your Own Movies
Let’s say you break out your digital movie camera and decide that the cheapest route to making movies for the Internet is to talk your friends (the cheapest actors you know) into getting freaky in front of the camera.
Here it is two weeks later and you’ve discovered that you can’t talk your friends, or your friends’ friends, or anybody else for that matter into getting freaky in front of the camera.
Or, perhaps you were successful, and now you wished that you’d never asked, because, now you’ve succeeded in scarring your mind for life and you’ll never be able to look your friends in the eye again.
So, to save yourself from a fate worse than death – editing all that nasty-ass film you just spent hours shooting – you’ve decided that you’re just gonna go out and BUY the damn movie. Hell, you’re gonna go right on out and buy a whole friggin’ bunch of them, or rather, the right to use them on the Internet. Which leads us to…
Buying Movies
In order to buy the kind of movies you want to show on your member site, you have to find a studio whose movies you want to show.
Then you have to contact the studio, buy plane tickets to wherever they are, buy them lunch at a nice restaurant to impress upon them that you mean business, and then spend at least four hours talking them into signing a content agreement because there is no way in hell that they’re going to sell you the complete rights to a single movie, never mind the 100 titles you had your heart set on.
Your costs would break down as follows:
Plane ticket to California: $500.00 (on a cheap flight that hops from airport to airport in the dead of night)
Hotel: $125.00 (a night)
Lunch: $300.00 (food, drink, tipping the strippers, etc.)
Contract agreement: A major share of your profits – once you have the movies ready to stream.
Now that you have one studio’s movies, you still have many more studios to go, just to compete with the competition.
Streaming Your Movies
So, now it’s time to take your hard-won movies from several dozen studios and turn them into electronic, streaming media. (Hey, you got lucky! It only took you two years to convince all those studios to speak to you on the phone, never mind doing actual business with you.)
Streaming videos into Real and Windows Media require approximately 24 employees on two 8-hour shifts (12 bodies per shift) to render 50 movies a day into streaming media. Then, it takes at least four experienced people to load your brand-new streaming media onto the server and encode it so that other Webmasters can’t steal (or piggyback onto) the video streams. And then there’s holiday pay, benefits and a plethora of other employee issues…
Those costs break down as follows:
Equipment: $12,000 in one lump sum OR
Leasing: $800.00 / month
Bandwidth to broadcast 800 videos: (Are you really sure you want to go there?)
Plus you have the cost to retain a production staff, encoding staff and support employees to keep on the payroll never mind the cost of renting a building, office equipment, contractor, utilities… the list goes on (are you a masochist?)
At $20.00 a membership, how many would you have to sell to break even?
There is another way to get all the movies you need for your member site without all the headaches and hassle of doing it yourself. You can go to AEBN.com for no set-up fee, and starting at a measly $99.00 a month, you can get some bandwidth and over 200 video streams representing over 200+ studios in excess of 50+ niches, that rotate out every 30 days!
And all you had to do was drop a check in the mail.
