CROSS PLATFORM PACKAGING AND BUNDLING

Since viewers are demanding access to content on multiple devices, you will need to offer bundled pricing for different content formats. Subscribers have also shown a willingness to pay a premium for the ability to access digital content on multiple devices and platforms.

Today’s customers expect a variety of services and pricing plans, so they can choose one that best suits their needs. With a multitude of pricing approaches at your fingertips, an important consideration will be the number and types of service packages to offer. Your commerce system must allow you to support numerous service configurations, rapidly experiment with new plans, and change dynamically as market or competitive situations dictate.

ONE-TIME CHARGES

While you may not adopt it as a component in all your offerings, your system should support the ability to charge customers a one-time fee to get started with your service, or to monetize single non-recurring content such as sporting events and award ceremonies. This is an important touchpoint to convert such viewers to ongoing, paid subscriptions.

RECURRING CHARGES

Your system should allow your subscription pricing model to have a recurring component. It should provide the flexibility to define different time intervals for the recurring charges such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. And support additional complexities, such as when recurring charges are calculated (e.g., 1st of the month vs. anniversary date) and what proration rules apply (e.g., for partial months).

In addition, your system needs to support different types of recurring charges for content. Recurring charges might be fixed – a flat fee that gets charged each month to customers. Or they might be variable – a charge calculated by multiplying units purchased (e.g., number of articles downloaded) by a set price. Or, they might be calculated based on detailed usage statistics: a usage-based pricing model.

PAY-AS-YOU-GO CHARGES

You will sometimes have customers that don’t want to commit to a subscription, and only wish to pay for what they use. For example, one of people’s pet peeves with cable has been the fact that they are forced to pay for channels they neither watch nor want. Flexible media on-demand has the opportunity to capture these audiences who demand tailored offerings and value pricing. Your system must be flexible enough to offer and manage this level of detail and customization.

B2ANY PRICING

Leading media companies have adopted sales models that include both businesses and consumers as their end customers. For example, The Wall Street Journal and Spotify sell subscriptions to consumers, and also sell bulk subscriptions to businesses. Leading educational and medical publishers often have both direct consumer and enterprise customers.

Many of your subscribers will have both B2B and B2C characteristics. You should not have to deploy separate platforms to manage the different pricing strategies. Your system should be able to meet the pricing, promotion, and discounting requirements of high-volume, low-touch consumer sales, and low-volume, high-touch enterprise sales within a single unified platform.

MULTI-CURRENCY PRICING

The internet makes it possible for your content to reach subscribers across geographic boundaries, often opening opportunities for new and significant sources of revenue. You will need to decide whether you’d like international customers to sign-up for your service. If yes, you must make it easy for them to pay for it in their local currency. For this, you will need a system that supports multiple currency types and date formats. In addition, you may also need a system (and particularly a web self-service portal) that can be localized in the languages of the countries where you primarily do business.

CONSUMERS CHOICE

Consumers are shouting out the message loud and clear that they want to be able to choose and access the content they want, when they want it, and how they want it. The modern media company needs to cater to consumers by packaging and pricing fresh content in compelling ways in order to attract – and hold on to – subscribers.