We have had a couple MindBites authors recently that asked us about selling their video content via a subscription-based site.  In some instances, they were doing this already but not entirely crazy about their current provider and in some instances they were just starting to think about creating a subscription site.

Hence, we figured this would be a good thing to ask the rest of the author community about!  What services do you know of out there that can help someone make a subscription site?  If you have a subscription-site, what are you using?  What do you like/dislike about it?  Would you recommend it?  Have you tried other offerings that you would recommend (or heartily not recommend)?

One author specifically wanted to find a solution whereby videos would be hosted securely and only available streamed online (e.g. not downloadable).  He’d like for comments to be enabled, too, and he’d also like a payment gateway through which subscribers can sign up and pay monthly (he currently uses paypal for this, but he’d like a solution that would enable payment by paypal or credit card)... 

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

One fairly well-established option out there is subhub (http://www.subhub.com).  For $97/month (or $997/year), you can use the platform to support a subscription-based business.  There are some bandwidth and storage limitations (15GB monthly bandwidth, 5GB storage), but the platform sounds like a pretty robust one. 

On the payment front, SubHub is integrated with PayPal and is set up to easily integrate with a merchant account, if you have one.  (This is the kind of account you need to set up to be able to accept credit cards).

This was fed into me after this posting from one of our authors via email: I begin a subhub trial, watched almost all of their training videos and have a few things to report:

Pros
Integrated system
Subscription content, payment gateway, automated emails
Quick setup of users and membership groups

Cons
Files can be uploaded only one at a time
Each file needs to be 100MB or less
The upload mechanism may time out (and it does..)
Total storage they provide: 5GB
Emails sent out to subscribers are only in plain text

Anyone found anything out there that works better?

Awesome! That’s really helpful information. I’m interested in starting a subscription-based site but don’t have the server memory space to host my own videos. However, I didn’t know it was so expensive to have another site host them for you…