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 Jamie,
This doesn't answer your question (my apologies), but I do have a question for you: are you planning on hosting ticketed events on YouTube? Or is it free/PWYC content?I ask because as other users mentioned in this thread, it's come to my attention that selling YouTube URLs is technically a violation of YT's terms of service. It seems like a low probability, high impact situation: in that, the likelihood of being punished/having a video removed is low, but the consequences would be high. Just wondering where you are at... we are also thinking this through.
Lana
Hi Lana -
While I've flagged the TOS concerns for those typically responsible for this sort of thing, I'm comfortable moving forward with YT for this project because the income aspect is rather far removed. The majority of the videos involved are/will be already published elsewhere with no login required, and even this version has costs per video asset of $0. All of the videos (and other non-video assets) are resources for participants within a particular education program. Teachers et al will be able to register for the program either at a free level, or for a small fee that increases what they have access to. Some of the tools for the latter level are on YouTube, but we expect that teachers will need to distribute various urls to remote students and co-teachers and will make it clear that it is ok for them to do so. Our own Terms of Service will lay out that they can't republish it widely, nor profit from it, though.
The overarching frame for us is that we want some quantifiable numbers to go into fundraising and advocacy reports AND we want some sort of insider-feeling to participation like usual. So, the gated content gets us reportable transactions ("I want this particular video program") and a relationship. The likely framing for promotion will be about the relationship getting you support beyond the public content and the convenience of having all your resources compiled for you on one web page.
We will start from scratch in terms of considering video platform if/when there is a non-school usage, especially if dollars need to tie in. At this time, however, it doesn't look like we'll have Earned Income goals for our digital content--possible to do more free things but require registration, or add a donate request via One Page Giving. As a presenting organization and one focused on Theater for Young Audiences, our pandemic concentration has elevated Arts Education, since it can take so many shapes while kids' routines are so different.
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.
We ran into this issue recently as a number of our performances are moving to digital in wake of the pandemic. I was tasked with developing a system for gated content and took the route of a combination of a PHP plugin for Wordpress ( our main site uses as CMS ) which pulls from Tessitura API with CRON scheduler and emails links to ticketed constituents. I build the links using constituent id and performance id and save relevant data pertinent to each in database.
Our access point is just a Vimeo embed with domain restriction enabled and have a 24 hour cookie set for an individual constituent to use.
I built this in Wordpress because I wanted to give my project stakeholders a way to manage streamed events ( adding the individual stream url, manual ticket emailing, etc. )