After fours years of tweaking and pivoting, WorldTV, which brings a TV channel-viewing experience to online video publishing, finally thinks it has the model right and is flicking the switch on an in-app store for à la carte premium features.
The ‘friends and family’-funded company has been cashflow positive since 2009 but after experimenting with an ad-supported model, which proved disappointing, and pitting this against selling add-on ‘subscription’ products, World TV has settled on the latter with the launch of its own custom-built store offering 33 subscription/add-ons available for instant purchase, some of which are available for a one-off payment while others produce recurring monthly revenue.
These include various customisation to the look and feel of the video player, branding and EPG, along with the ability to run Google Adsense or other types of video advertising. This, says World TV, sets up the service to be more targeted at B2B, although a free basic version aimed at consumers will remain.
In fact, the company already claims 1,000+ paying customers garnered through its testing period, while since launch in November 2007, World TV has amassed 100,000 active ‘Editor’ users and is seeing 1,000,000 active monthly viewers. In addition, more than 250,000 channels have been created, giving World TV the claim of being the “largest online TV network in the World”, although your definition of what constitutes an online TV network may vary.
On that note, in the long term the service is targeting a new breed of Internet-connected televisions like those from Samsung, Sony and others, together with platforms such as Yahoo! ConnectedTV and Google TV.
