How to Create a Live Sports Streaming Website and Monetize with PPV

Sports is blessed with a never-ending craze among the fans. From club soccer, cricket, rugby, baseball to chess matches, fans always buy tickets to their favorite sporting events. It is one such sphere which has never seen a decline in the revenue.

Each day, new sports are being added to the broadcast-able list, and TV channels are broadcasting live events from an array of genres. These days, the craze for sports have gone up in the sky with live streaming services broadcasting sports events directly to the user’s mobile app and web browsers.

How profitable are sports live streaming?

In a busy life where most of the people do not get time to watch their favorite team playing on the TV, live streaming mobile apps and website applications allow them to take a peek no matter where they are.

You can guess the popularity of online sports streaming by the fact that a significant population in the US prefer watching games on their TV App or mobile APP even if they can watch it on the regular TV broadcast. It has happened with the growing popularity of VOD platforms like Netflix and Hulu, which allow users to stream TV content through the internet.

Users today utilize OTT streaming as a way to avoid the cable TV bills, and in addition, they get access to some extra content like on-demand Movies, Web series, Sports streaming, and Original content. Where streaming services are coming up with additional benefits- in addition to the regular TV content- it’s rational that traditional TV is declining in developed countries with good internet penetration.

The same reason has also made live sports streaming popular among the audience and has given businesses an easy way to make money live streaming app based sports content. As per the ticket sales are concerned, the innovative revenue model of ‘pay-per-view’ has made the stream monetization seamlessly supple.

How profitable is the pay-per-view model for sports streaming?

Tickets as always make a major proportion of the revenue generated by any sporting event. The idea of selling pay-per-view (PPV) access to the live streaming platform is identical to the ticket-selling. You can sell the pay-per-view access to the stream in the same way you can sell tickets for the stadium entry. Just host a live stream, place a ticket cost, and let them buy the stream access.

1. They pay higher revenue compared to the Ads

Ads are more like passive income source. They pay a good amount, but only over a long period of time. For short-lived events like sports, you cannot depend entirely on Ads to pay up for the involved expenditure and generate profit. Events bundled with PPV and make a great fortune with Ads. For example, events like cricket give enough time to play mid-roll Ads in between the game. So you can always add the Ads revenue to your profit. However, you cannot always be sure you can always play enough Ads to make up for the cost.

2. Pay-Per-View are more flexible options

People hesitate to purchase an entire subscription for huge amounts. Unless you have something like rights of broadcasting the whole super bowl seasons, it is very tough to convince customers for a monthly subscription package. On the other hand, PPV gives them the freedom to pay only for what they want to watch. They can simply buy access to the match they want to watch and avoid the huge upfront cost of buying a recurring package.

3. You Get Paid Instantly

Both advertising and subscription model involves a delay in payouts. Advertisers mostly pay you on a monthly basis and the same goes to the subscribers. However, PPV eliminates this delay and lets you claim your earning upfront. Users buying access to the event, pay you instantly.

4. PPV Is Easy To Set Up

It’s amazingly easy to set up with any business model. In fact, you can always bundle the PPV model with others, for example, PPV+Ads and PPV+Subcription. You can always sell extra premium content with your regular content. You can take a cue from YouTube in this case. In addition to Ad revenue, the platform also offers some premium content with the PPV model only.

How to create a sports streaming website with Pay-per-view model?

Creating a website is butter these days. For spoilers, you don’t even have to code one from scratch. Having said that, I would like to mention two extremely effective ways to build your sports streaming site-

1. Develop your website from scratch

If you have the development skills and you can spare the money, time, and resources to build everything by yourself, go for this approach. Depending on development factors, you would need to divide the cost components of your project into five groups:

You will have to pay the salary and resource cost of maintaining a team of at least 7-10 experts, which will include:

Web developers
iOS developers
Android developers
Back-end developers
UI designers
Software testers and
Marketers

With all these variables, salary, API cost, and development charges taking as minimum as $50/per hours, a sports streaming platform would cost you around:

$80.000+ for web version with fundamental features
$100.000+ for iOS App
$100.000+ for Android App
Total of $280.000+ for the entire suite (Apps, Website, and Push notifications).

2. Use a pre-developed video streaming solutions

It indeed a hassle-full task to create a sports streaming platform from scratch. That’s why I recommend the alternate way. In other words, the best way is buying a ready-made script. In this method there are two possible solutions:

a) Purchase a SaaS-based live stream solution and embed in your existing website

There are various SaaS-based live streaming solutions in the market which allow simple embedding of the live stream video players in any web-page. These sports streaming software solutions give you access to their could-based dashboard where you can create your stream, set payment method, and get an embedding code. Later you can embed this code on any website to let users purchase the ticket and access the stream.

This method is suitable for the occasional love streamers who have their blogging or business websites and want to broadcast a special event to their audience. It’s not a very professional approach if you are thinking about adopting sports streaming as your business activity. That’s why the next approach in the best possible solution in this regard.

b) Purchase a custom video streaming suite (turnkey video streaming platform)

These are also the pre-developed sports streaming software solutions. The only difference is they come as

Self-hosted
Open-source code
With a complete suite of-
Live streaming software
Website (Web RTC)
Android App
iOS App

That means you will get a ready-made suite where you can access the admin dashboard on your own web host server. You will have access to the source code, which you can always use to customize the platform and the UI the way you want.

I think this is the best approach as you don’t have to spend on the development and still, you can always customize the platform on the requirement. Moreover, unlike SaaS, you will get full control over your platform with just a one-time payment. So get a custom live streaming platform bundled with self-hosted sports streaming software and pay-per-view revenue model to process with your cause.

How to monetize with Pay-per-view?

Once you have the suite, you get access to stream live events on almost every platform (web, Android, and iOS). You can use the built-in pay-per-view revenue model to monetize your live streams.

Please note: Make sure to choose a platform that supports other revenue models as well, as many a time you need to broadcast events for free with Ad revenue. So having a platform with at least Ads, Subscription, and PPV models will work in your favor.

1. Get the streaming rights

If you are not streaming your own events, the first step would be getting the broadcast rights from the owner. Depending on the kind of the event, you would need to acquire several permissions to get the streaming rights.

You would have to get the rights from the league owner. For example, if it’s ICC cricket match, ICC would be the right point of contact.
You would need to take the permission of the owner if the event is happening in a privately owned property. For example, if you want to stream a live event of a counter-strike championship in a school, the school body is the point of contact here.

2. Create a new live stream.

Once you have the permission and all the rights, the next step is setting up your stream and stream environment. In this there are two possible cases:

You are streaming your own event
You have purchased the rights from a third-party broadcaster.

If you are streaming your own event, you are responsible for setting up all the additional software and hardware required to cover the event and then broadcasting it to the public. The broadcasting part is well-covered by the custom streaming platform you bought. However, the covering part needs some setup which would involve-

Internet connectivity at the venue
Cameras from all the angles
Microphones
Computers with capture devices (or professional encoders for live streaming)
Broadcast managers like Streamlabs OBS
Live scoreboard software and overlays
Live chat software (if not present in the custom streaming platform)

3. Set your ticket price

Depending on the above factors, after setting up the environment, you can now set up the stream on your platform (web and mobile apps). You can access the streamer or Admin dashboard of your platform and set up the stream.

In the same process you and set and control the aspects like

Stream access (Public or Private)
Access cost (PPV rate)
Stream details (Title, Meta Tags, description, etc.)

4. Start Pre-Selling Tickets

Once you have set the stream and stream price, now you can continue with the marketing to sell your tickets. You should start pre-selling the access to sell as many tickets for the event. You can use social media marketing, banner ads, Search Engine Ads, many more ways to market your event.

5. Create a landing page on your site

Create a landing page on your site so that the customers who have purchased the ticket can browse to join the event on the schedule. You can use the push notifications to alert your customers one the stream is live. In addition to the direct link to live stream video player, make your landing page as informative as possible.

Go live

Go live on the scheduled date and give your audience the best possible so that they would come back for other events too. The future of your newly launched sports streaming service depends on your stream quality and the viewing experience. So always choose the best of the software and hardware solutions involved in the entire process. Do not forget to inspect the streaming engine of your platform before purchasing it. Always choose the platforms with the best servers and engines for uncompromised streaming quality. For example, AWS, Wowza, Redis, etc.