Guide21 May 2026
Ticketed and pay-per-view streaming: how it actually works
If you want to charge people to watch, the production is only half the job. The other half is the thing they buy a ticket on, and that part has more ways to go wrong.
Daniel Wilkinson
Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia
The three pieces
The player
A page where the stream appears, gated so only people who have paid can see it. This is usually a microsite on its own domain rather than a page on your main website, because it needs to handle traffic spikes and payment without taking the rest of your site down with it.
The payment
Stripe is the standard. The buyer pays, gets an email with a link, and that link works for them and not for the ten people they forward it to.
The support
On the night, a percentage of your buyers will have a problem. Wrong email address, link in spam, paid twice, watching on a smart TV that will not cooperate. Somebody has to answer those messages while the show is running, and it cannot be the person cutting the cameras.
That third one is the piece most people forget to plan and the one that generates every complaint.
Things worth deciding early
- Refund policy, in writing, before you sell a single ticket. What happens if the stream drops for ten minutes. What happens if the event is cancelled. Decide it, publish it, and you will not be negotiating it at midnight.
- How long the recording stays up. Buyers will assume they can rewatch. If they cannot, say so on the checkout page.
- Whether you geo-block. Sometimes a rights holder requires it. Sometimes you are leaving money on the table by doing it.
- What the free preview shows. A holding card with a countdown converts better than a dead page, and it lets buyers confirm their link works before the show starts.
On the production side
Paid audiences are less forgiving than free ones, which is the entire argument for redundancy. That means a backup encoder path, bonded connectivity across multiple carriers with Starlink as a further layer, and a plan for what goes on screen if the worst happens.
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Written by
Daniel Wilkinson
Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia
Dan has run live production since 2014, from single-camera council committee streams to sixty-date arena tours. He has worked in 18 UK arenas including The O2, the AO Arena and the OVO Hydro, and covers 16 or more festivals and 30 or more arena dates a year. He writes these from the job rather than from a desk.