You will need to be PCI compliant
This can be done very cheaply if you know what your doing and do some sys admin yourself. The tools to complete this involve a PCI scan and SAQ wizard : http://www.pcicompliance.org.uk/
This site offers both for 198 GBP which is a bargin.
The next thing is you NEVER store the card details on your sever, instead your (merchant account) payment gateway provider will issue you a tokenID or sometimes you tell them the token ID that is used for recurring billing etc. and that way you only have to verify the card details once, typically a charge of £1 or something small then you get the token id store that in your DB and use it for all transactions, that way you never store card numbers and all is posted only once across ssl.
Depending upon the features you have on your site you may find it difficult to get a merchant account and payment gateway provider to accept you.
For example if you have any live chat features or webcams that would raise a flag and place you into a very high risk and potentially impossible place to get an account.
offerings so far do not use the get hooked before you buy.
Also the variables are fully adjustable so people can allow 1 year of access etc..
The video I created as an example took me a few hours which includes the time needed to make the codecs. Of course though higher quality videos take longer but still they can be made relatively painlessly today.
We have seen many large companies fail who relied solely on ads: Veoh, Stage6, even Google video failed to make money from ads!
The problem with ads is the cpm is always so low on such content and the bandwidth so high, it was this problem which led me to develop the general concept for my own http://www.documentary-film.net which was always on the brink of closure until I implemented this concept.
It worked so well that sales increased over 90% and I was able to afford a proper CDN (highwinds) to deliver the content.
After this I didn't think more about it until Andrew Warner @ Mixergy mentioned about charging for his content and I told him that introducing a pay wall (as he planed) would result in viewings going to zero, instead I told him to develop something like I had with doc-film-net.
Of course his response was, where's the plug in for that?
That's when I had the aha moment and built it for him and anyone else who is in the same boat. There's a ton of tech involved to achieve this feature and its way out of depth for the average content producer.
Don't you feel that with video, the reason it has been traditionally poor at converting or monetizing is because the systems used so far have generally been pay walls.
Pay walls eliminate customers because its like anything what you don't know you don't miss.
This new concept however, works much like real world interactions where the consumer can get hooked on the content before having to pay.
I think this is a fundamental shift from Pay walls...
Note: I am one of the people who have moved away from Paypal, I have become PCI compliant (which I did myself for 250 euros) but this I think would really cost 2k plus for any company. It took me a week to navigate. I ended up setting up a simple solution for others to help them efficiently with this http://www.pcicompliancesaq.com
However, the whole process was tedious, I went all the way through due diligence which took about 4 weeks with one merchant who then wanted a 5.25% rate plus about 500 month in fees.
I finally found a sensible merchant who offered me 3.5% and sensible rates, who I am extremely pleased with, their support is great and now I'm through the other side I am very pleased I have.
The payment gateway is much quicker and smother than sending clients to Paypal and then having them be returned to my site (which in a small % fails because clients interrupt the process needing me to manually configure).
But all in all it's easier to start your company with Paypal then move to a merchant account later when you have some trading history and the time and resources to invest.
But don't be under the impression that you will get going as simple as you did with Paypal.
1) You will need to be PCI compliant (cost 2k +)
2) You will may need to spend 30 days going through due diligence
3) You may be considered high risk and have to pay much more
4) You may have a high rolling reserve (up to 10% for 6 months).
5) You will need to redesign according the merchants API, while paypal is pretty much 1,2,3.
6) You will probably be not taken on if you have no previous history...
"Perhaps more important was that the subject, who was none other than Marshall himself, failed to develop an ulcer. Note also that the disease resolved without treatment."
This story suggest that he didn't get an ulcer (but he did get all the first symptoms) and that he didn't treat it with (antibiotics) which he did and which eventually cured his own symptoms (and nearly cost him his marriage as his wife left him shortly after doing this).
"As with many tales of dedicated discoverers, you marvel at the tolerance of the family. When Marshall conducted his experiment on himself, he and his wife Ariadne, a psychologist, had four children aged between 10 and 3. He didn't inform Ariadne, or any of his colleagues, about what he was doing, mainly because he knew they'd object.
“I'm a selfish so-and-so”
“A few days after taking the bacteria I began to feel this heavy fullness after eating, and then on day five the vomiting started. One of the reasons I didn't tell my wife about it was that she had whiplash from a car accident. There was a lot of chaos in the family and in the middle of this each morning I would wake before dawn and run to the toilet to vomit. I had bad breath and I looked terrible. You have to admit I'm a selfish so-and-so to even go ahead with the experiment.”
Ten days after drinking the bacteria, Marshall had an endoscopy and other tests to show that his previously bug-free stomach was thoroughly infected and that he was showing the same signs as his patients.
“At that point I couldn't restrain myself; I had to tell the wife. She was speechless.” He laughs. “But it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” She insisted that he took antibiotics to clear up the infection straight away, though Marshall wanted to continue until he had a full-blown ulcer."
Also gastronome enteritis and related diseases was responsible for over 5k deaths (globally) -- a week -- during the period it was known but not accepted 1983 - 1997.
"Marshall swallowed a culture of the bacterium. A week later, he began suffering acute symptoms of gastritis, and biopsies revealed that he had developed both infection with H. pylori and severe acute gastritis. Fortunately, the sequel was a successful case of "Physician, heal thyself"!
further:
"At this stage, bismuth subcitrate was commonly used to treat ulcers, although it was uncertain how the drug worked. Marshall surmised that it might kill the H. pylori bacteria, and he subsequently discovered that a combination of bismuth with antibiotics completely eradicated the bacteria. He then set out to test the hypothesis that elimination of H. pylori could result in a permanent cure of gastric ulcer."
"From 1985 to 1987, Warren and Marshall studied the use of antibiotics as treatment for ulcer. Their finding that 80% of patients were permanently cured of their ulcer if H. pylori were eradicated, proved a landmark in clinical gastroenterology practice. It resulted in a complete reassessment of ulcer treatment, and this therapy is now accepted as an essential part of the management of ulcer disease."
He was also ignored totally by all the main stream publications, it was later alleged they had close ties to Glaxo and the editors were fully aware of the significance the impact would have had on Glaxo.
One such case is of Barry Marshall and H.Pylori, he was awarded the nobel price in 2005 for discovering the cure to ulcers, (antibiotics) but he first discovered the cure in 1983 and after about 10 years of 'trying' to convince the medical community of which (Glaxo who was dominant in that market) was making 90% of their profits from Zantac (an anti acid treatment) - (known inside as the 'Zantac years'), they were accused of thwarting his discovery. Tired of the lack of interest, in about 1992 he did a live experiment on himself by swallowing a wapping dose of H.pylori and induced an ulcer, then proceeded to cure this with a course of antibiotics. He did this in the glare of the media and thereby changed the course of treatment worldwide for ulcers... How many would do that?
However, I agree with the point though that too many HNers often seem to be naive about the larger picture which I guess we could all be accused of in some way.
The payment part is clean, its a few clicks and your done, it happens in another window and you go back and continue watching from where you left off.
It works by looking at how much content they has watched then after a set time (which the publisher decides) they get paused and asked to pay, so only once they are hooked on it are they asked to pay.
I use the system with great success on my doc site :http://www.documentary-film.net/ and before implementing the concept there the site was always in trouble as the bandwidth costs were so high and if I placed the content behind a pay wall sales went to zero. As soon as I introduced this concept the sales went up by 90%, so I know the system works.
The problem is I thought it was a great idea but so far the response has been pretty light and I'm just thinking is it worth continuing to push along or should I just try something else?
best steve