Hello,
We are looking at different ways to sell digital live stream content this season, and since TNEW's gated digital content feature has been moved to release in late August, I am wondering if any Tessitura users out there can share what they are doing now to sell gated content, particularly if you are using Tessitura/ TNEW for the sales path, and connecting to a third party stream from there somehow? What I am currently envisioning is selling on Tessitura/ TNEW, and then emailing a link to ticket buyers close to the time of a performance. Of course there are easy ways to break through the gate with this method, for example if we use VIMEO, where the password or direct link could be shared with non-buyers. While I'm not incredibly concerned about the dishonesty of our ticket holders forwarding their direct links along to other people, I'd love to know others' experiences and approaches have been with this. Or, maybe there is something simple that I am missing which would allow me to make the streaming more secure.
For Tessitura staff - We are looking to begin selling gated content before the TNEW release, but the actual performances may take place after the release, and so in addition to any third party workarounds that Tessitura users can provide, would we be able to take a performance sold before the release and convert it to a gated digital performance?
I have been searching the community forums and have not found a recent discussion on how people are selling gated content currently, and so if there is already one in progress that I missed, I'd love to be linked to it.
Thanks for your help, and I hope everyone is staying healthy out there!
Andrew
Hi everyone, this is a fantastic thread and so helpful - thank you!
Now that the TNEW Gated Content is out on LIVE - has anyone given any thought to how Guest Checkout plays into all this? I would assume that anyone with a Guest Checkout account cannot access the content because they don't have a login. Are you planning on turning Guest Checkout off in the standard purchase path (we still need it for One Page Giving) while selling Digital Content?
Similarly, if you have major donors/Board members who should receive access to a specific piece of content (it's Nutcracker for us), can we processed comp tickets on their accounts to grant them access? Does anyone have VIPs who just never use TNEW and don't know their logins? Trying to think through if it would be easier to try and get them setup to access the content via TNEW or if we should just keep a separate list of VIPs who should get the content via a direct link to the content provider.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Lily
Hi Lily (and others who have brought up issues with guest checkout and digital content), We recognize the lack of control of offering guest checkout as an option at the product level is not ideal... especially in light of things like mobile tickets and digital content requiring an account in order to access. Our intention is to provide that layer of control to TNEW. We don't have specific timing on that right now but we have definitely appreciated the comments and feedback in this thread alone regarding this gap in functionality. Hazel's idea of using the country restriction logic to force registration / log in is a good one but Gawain, I get your point that unless you are restricting digital content sales to specific countries, the feature right now isn't set up to easily to do the opposite - exclude a small number of countries from the list. Our initial research and discussions with members suggested that the primary use case would be to limit sales to a small set of countries - especially at first as members sorted out how best to manage digital services taxes. We will be monitoring how the feature is being used now that it has been officially released, and Paul and I would appreciate continuing to hear from all of you as to what is working and what is not working so well. The questions and suggestions shared here in this thread have been really great to see, and we hope to hear more from you as you move forward with your digital strategies.