For sites out there that accept payments for video downloading, I was wondering if there was any way I could make my episodes available that way. The sites I've been looking at seem to be charging an arm and a leg for hosting which is sadly I'm not financially stable enough to afford.

Any ideas for help?

Thanks!

Unless you want to build your own system and get your own merchant account there are 3 popular options:

Clips4Sale (40% flat fee)
Mothership (30% flat fee)
UMD (20% flat fee but that may be changing)

If you want to pay variable hosting fees instead of a higher flat rate, you can opt for
Mothership (10% plus $5 per gigabyte storage fee)

I think most people around here who do not use one of the above have built their own systems.

How much would building our own systems cost?

I guess I may well state now that this is not going to strictly be for "Luck of the Draw" (but more episodes will be produced if the show does well) but I'm just trying to get a general idea of investment.

Depends on how much you charge yourself to build them

If you are paying a developer to roll a whole new download store system for you, then it would definitely be in the thousands if not 10's of thousands of dollars to build. It's not for the faint of heart. Once you've built the catalog system and content retrieval methods, then you have to deal with setting up some sort of merchant account or 3rd party solution and integrate that with your scripts. I'm sure there are prefab solutions out there, but I don't really know anything about them.

CCBill have support for download store type operations, I started looking at it a few years back but stopped when MessMaster opened the UMD's download store as that was easier. Oddly enough I was re-reading over their setup documentation the other day.

You need to be or know a decent programmer to make it work but the basic principles appear to be:

You pass a product ID back to CCBill in the "Buy it now" button code.

They pass that, and the buyer's details (incuding a username, same as for a membership) back to you once they've processed the transaction.

Scripting at your end is then responsible for creating the user their own directory with the content they've bought in it and the user/pass for them to access it set up. So they get their own tiny little members area with just the stuff they've bought in it. Access remains in place for a short while (say 5 days) then you auto-delete it.

Like I said I never got round to actually implementing it so don't know if there's complexity under there I've not spotted, but for anyone used to working with interactive websites it should be reasonably easy to set up.

I must add, if you go with a CCbill setup, you will still have to pay fees. Just because you "roll your own" does not mean you can escape giving the bank their cut.

That's the problem I have though. Sadly I don't know if there are enough people that watch the show to make a decent enough profit for it. I may be better off just making DVDs of the show and creating a small page to sell them.

I'm not sure if that in and of itself would make it easier or if I would still have to go through some vendor site.

CCBill will charge transaction fees, but if you set up your own shop on your own system (assuming you already have access to hosting space) then they won't charge any hosting fees, as they aren't hosting it.

For anything that isn't expected to sell large quantities, hosting fees should be avoided like the proverbial plague, but transaction fees are just a percentage of the sale price, so don't eat money when "idle".

You're shooting yourself in the foot doing just DVD's - no one buys them.

Instant gratification is the name of the game.

Throw down on themothership and see what happens, at worst you should sell enough to cover hosting and bandwidth. At good, you may make expenses to shoot another video. At excellent, you may even turn a profit.

Whatever you do, there is a cost of doing business... sometimes you just gotta roll the dice.

How can I get a store on the mothership?

Could someone email me the details? swimsuitvideos@googlemail.com

Cheers

Rawy

Send us an email at customerservice@themothership.net

Or course CCBill charges a $750 upfront fee to accept VISA card payments. (I think the renewal is $500 per year)

Yup. $500 fucking dollars. Every year. Another fee that users of download store systems like Mothership and this one don't have to worry about

Not if your business is European... you guys are getting fucked.

$500? Ouch - that's nasty! Though I gather it doesn't apply over here - EU banking rules presumably forbid it. You have to be a registered company, not just a sole trader, to take VISA on CCBill though and we aren't, so I'd forgotten that side of things.

Not a fan of VISA TBH, amongst other things because they are an official sponsor of the IOC and the London Olympics, anyone wanting to buy Olympic tickets has to use a VISA card. Doesn't matter how rich you are or how good your credit, unless you've a VISA card, no Olympics, the payment systems won't take anything else. Good thing I don't like sport,or at least not the ones they have at the Olympics - why aren''t competitive trouser filling, school uniform mud wrestling, the 20' fully clothed hose-down, and prom-dress bean-swimming, all Olympic sports?

So in other words, do some serious marketing and get my show up in views on Youtube lol. Everything else is asking for an arm and a leg.