Hollywood, megavideo and lessons I learned about charging for content online

I have a popular documentary site which has been around for many years, streaming full length docs for small beer, it pays the hosting costs basically. But what I learned over the years that in order to survive (i.e pay the bills as hosting / streaming content is relatively expensive) is that you have to adopt the Megavideo model, i.e charge for content only after people are addicted to it. They used to force payment after 60 free minutes. I struggled to make any cash with a paywall system and only when I switched to pay in video system did it start making money. Clearly the megavideo model worked as they had 6 million in assets ceased apparently (poor sods).

I built the concept out into a standalone system in Flash and its at karsa.co.uk but for these days it would need to work in html not flash.