Altnet’s DRM system gives you enormous flexibility in building a business model that suits your needs. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Pay-per-view
You issue licenses that expire after the first play, so that consumers need to purchase a new license each time they play the file.

Free preview
You issue free licenses 1-day licenses which allow the user to play the file on their PC but not burn it to CD. This gives users a free preview of the file, after which a license window will pop up and ask the user to buy the file.

It’s important to note that the free preview system works even though the entire file is already on the user’s computer – after they buy the full-play license they don’t have to download anything more. This removes a major sales impediment – if users know that the whole file is already on their machine and they could be watching it in just a few seconds they may be far more willing to commit. What’s great about doing this in a P2P environment is that the entire file (the free preview plus the paid part) is being distributed to millions of users at absolutely no bandwidth cost to you, allowing you to embrace new business models that weren’t feasible when you needed to pay the bandwidth cost of the file download from your server.

Multiple files can share the same license key
Just as a single key can unlock more than one door, licenses can also unlock more than one audio or video file. You can issue one license for each audio or video file, or you can issue a single license that works for many files. For example, you could issue a single license for all of the videos of one type on your web site, or issue a single license to unlock all of the videos offered on your subscription service.

The ability to have one license key unlock many files is very useful both to you and to your customers, allowing you to, for instance, allow users to buy one license that allows them to play, say, all your Kung Fu movies – this saves the user having to go through the purchase process again for each movie.

Subscription model
You operate a web site that has hundreds of movies available for download. Using Altnet, users don’t need to come to your site to download the movies because they get them from the P2P network instead, saving you enormous amounts on your bandwidth charges.

Of course you’ll still want to be paid for your movies, so when consumers click to play your files a popup window appears asking them to buy a license. This gives you full control over your content, even if it’s distributed over P2P networks, but if you have hundreds of files the process of having to buy a license each time could become tiresome for the user. The solution is a subscription model, where users pay a monthly fee of, say, $10 for unlimited access to all your movies. At the end of each month the license expires. Consumers who renew their subscriptions receive new licenses, allowing them to continue to play all the movies they’ve downloaded. Consumers who do not renew their subscriptions are not able to continue playing the movies they’ve downloaded (but the files continue to be shared out from their computers and continue to be available for other P2P users to download from their computers).

These are just a few of the dozens of possible business models – we leave it to you to create ones that work for you!