WimTV offers new way to monetise sports events online

Centuries of history have taught many ways to monetise events offline. And there are many ways to monetise large events online. However, online monetisation of medium to small events is often a challenge: an in-house service has high setup and maintenance costs, administrative costs of managing payment collection may eat significantly into the revenues, and, more than anything else, it can be difficult to create trust between parties involved in event organisation and distribution.

Intended to put such concerns in the past, WimLive, a service of the WimTV platform, allows operators to decide whom they do business with, provides video-streaming services to customers, and, more important, manages payment collection and revenue sharing. WimTV offers an environment where operators can interact and lets them create and deploy new business models immediately and profitably.

A web-based platform with B2B marketplace and B2C distribution functionality, WimTV connects video professionals (creators, producers and service providers), advertisers, and distributors and also promotes an association of operators to provide the best choice to end users.

To achieve its goals, WimLive introduces two figures, or functions: Event Organiser, which organises the event, and Event Reseller, which promotes and distributes the event.

WimLive supports free streaming but also allows an Event Organizer to serve as Event Reseller in addition to the two figures’ serving separate functions. This lets the Event Organizer carry out the functions that are proper to the role while letting other operators play roles congenial to them.

WimTV administrative functions let an Event Reseller (for example, a local broadcaster) manage its event programming. For each event, the Reseller can set various parameters — date, duration, etc. — and particularly those agreed on with the Event Organizer (a band, says, or a football team): ticket price, revenue-sharing percentage. Also, WimLive allows more entities to claim a slice of the pie.

Says WimLabs CEO Leonardo Chiariglione, “WimLive is a companion service to WimTV’s Video on Demand that already supports video streaming with a variety of business models, such as free, pay-per-view, and subscription. Any payment received by a user of WimTV services is immediately split among rightsholders according to licensing information associated to each video. WimLive,” he adds, “allows an Event Reseller who has reached an agreement with an Event Organiser to obtain from the WimTV platform a sharing of each individual payment.”

For each single payment received from an end user consuming an event, WimLabs withholds an agreed amount for its service and automatically credits the agreed shares to the Event Reseller’s and Event Organiser’s PayPal accounts.

WimLive opens new opportunities to monetise events for which it has been impossible to get an economic return not offset by administrative costs. The entire event administration, including payment splitting, is managed by WimTV, a feature of vital importance to retain profitability of medium to small events. www.wimlabs.com