PPV (pay-per-view) is a transactional model where the viewer pays a one-off fee to access a single event, typically live - marquee sports, fights, concerts. It is a sibling of TVOD rental/purchase but centered on a time-bound live moment rather than a catalog title.
PPV concentrates two hard problems at once: a transactional purchase and entitlement flow, and a massive, synchronized live audience that all arrives at the same minute. That combination stresses billing, entitlement, concurrency, origin shielding, and anti-piracy simultaneously, which is why high-profile PPV events are among the most demanding things an OTT platform can run.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
Pay-per-view sells access to one live event, so purchases, entitlements, and the stream itself all peak in the same minutes. The seven volumes cover the video stack; for PPV start with Volume 3 on DRM, CDNs, and streaming economics, then Volume 1 on encoding, with live ingest and latency in Volume 2. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Selling a live PPV event and need payments and playback to hold at the peak?
We will review your purchase flow and live pipeline and send a PPV launch plan with a load test and anti-sharing controls. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
