ECC 07 Trailer, UltiVillage Musings

UltiVillage recently posted a trailer for the 2007 Emerald City Classic. It features tons of great clips, and it really wants to be available in a higher resolution, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.

Speaking of UltiVillage, I don't know what they pay for bandwidth now, but it occurs to me that at least for the Clip of the Day and trailers they could get a SmugMug account and store hi-res video clips there (check the quality of that demo video, would only cost them $60/year to host 2.5 minute clips, $150/year to host 5 minute clips). I've also wondered about them moving to some kind of pay-per-view model for UltiTV. I assume the UltiTV clips are the same low resolution, but a pay-per-view model would allow users to choose to only watch the clips they want to see, and to pay more to watch them in higher resolution. Bandwidth costs would be a concern, obviously, along with managing the payments, but Amazon has some tantalizing web services available that are really perfect for this kind of application. I'm pretty far afield from a fitness post now, so you can stop reading if you want, but here are the services that UltiVillage could use:

First, for storing the videos online there's Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3):

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers (write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited).

The thing that really makes this shine is the pricing, which is practically tailor-made for pay-per-view:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

• No charge for delete requests

So lets say UltiVillage wanted to store a full DVD's worth of video online (a bit less than 5GB for a single-sided, single-layer disc, but we'll round up to 5GB for these back-of-the-envelope calculations). Nice, high-res stuff. It would cost $0.50 to copy the data into S3, and $0.75/month to store it. It would cost $0.90 for a user to download it (assuming they watched the whole thing, at high resolution). So suppose it's up for a year, 100 people watch it, and you charge $2.00 per view. UltiVillage costs are a one-time upload of $0.50, $9.00 to host it for a year, and $90 for it to be downloaded 100 times, for a total of $99.50. They collect $200 for a profit of $100.50. Of course, the numbers would change if they offered several resoutions to choose from; users could choose to pay more/less depending on what resolution they wanted to download.

Now, I'm not a businessman, and I have no idea if $2 would be a good price point for them. There's salaries, cameras, film, and all the other costs that come with running the business. I have no idea how many customers they have, whether those customers would prefer a pay-per-view model, and how much people would pay. Finally, I have no idea how this might affect their DVD sales. But speaking for myself, I'm not an UltiTV subscriber currently because I don't like the low-res QuickTime files, and I'm only interested in a few of the videos they offer. But I'd definitely do pay-per-view for higher resolution versions. How much would I pay? Not sure. I'd probably put $20 into an account and then pick and choose a few high-res games to watch, hopefully at somewhere between $2 and $5 a pop. Totally off the cuff, but that's the ballpark.

The other piece of this would be managing the pay-per-view accounts/payments. For that there's Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS). It's in limited beta now, but it looks promising (and you could always see about getting in on the beta). Pricing (which obviously affects the estimates above):

For Transactions >= $10:
1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
2.9% + $0.30 for credit card

For Transactions < $10:
1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
5.0% + $0.05 for credit card

For Amazon Payments balance transfers < $0.05:
20% of the transaction amount, with a minimum fee of $0.0025

It could be done! The question of whether it should be done is one for the bean counters. I'd sure like it, though.

(Oh, it would be nice, while we're at it, if the UltiVillage site had some social networking components built in. Perhaps allow paying customers to rate the videos so others know how to best spend their pay-per-view money, maybe a forum so videos can be discussed, allow users to upload commentary tracks that synchronize with the video, etc. I mean, as long as I'm musing about somebody else's business model...)

(The piracy issue is a whole 'nother can of worms. I don't know how much sharing/stealing of UltiTV videos happens now: one guy on the team gets an account, downloads the videos, passes them around. I'm sure it happens. Heck, DVDs can be ripped and the high-res files shared, for that matter. Not sure how high-res pay-per-view changes this behavior, or again, how that would affect DVD sales. If it makes it worse, hopefully it is offset by new customers like me, who don't subscribe to UltiTV because of the low-res, and don't buy the DVDs because I only want to watch them once, not over and over.)