“Even if we were to stay with a one-stop shop, we would have still brought in the payment provider. When you look at e-commerce, or just the transactional piece as a while, that’s one of the most important ones in terms of customer acquisition and retention.”
Stéphanie Giardina, COO, VBTV
Number 6 in the run-up to Streaming Made Easy Live and this one is all about the checkout page. Stéphanie Giardina is COO of VBTV, Volleyball World’s platform, streaming over 3,000 live matches a year. Two years ago she took the one-stop shop she had launched on and split it into three specialists. Payments and subscription went to Cleeng, where Joachim Bergman is COO. Two years on, both of them were willing to talk on camera about how the split has gone.
Brazil is where the decision got tested. VBTV had opened the market recently and demand was climbing fast. Then people started stalling at the last step of the funnel, at a rate worse than anywhere else they operate. Nothing about the demand explained it. What they did about it was launch Pix Automático together, just like the streaming giants Netflix, Disney+ and Globoplay had done. Joachim’s constraint: 200 countries and thousands of payment methods and you cannot say yes to all of them. Brazil was a no brainer with Pix reaching 76.4% of Brazilians, more than debit cards do.
Stéphanie then puts the conversion lift down to trust, the same instinct that makes you buy a German concert ticket from Eventim rather than a site you have never seen.
We also get into where the monthly-to-annual split has landed since it started at 90% monthly, the three e-commerce metrics Joachim’s team checks every week, why volleyball escapes football’s three-month churn gap, the iDEAL bug that only showed up on iPhone during a big event and what happens to support when contact volume goes up tenfold overnight.
Subscription management has always arrived as a dashboard. You read the chart and you ask your team what it means. On September 10th, Gilles Domartini and Kübra Güven are showing the other version, where you put the question to a retention agent sitting on your own subscriber data. That is the MCP server Cleeng published last week. Stéphanie is game but she spent this year building VBTV’s data infrastructure first because there is no point slapping an agent onto something patchy.
Watch our full conversation 👇🏻
That’s it for today but before you go, check out who’s attending Streaming Made Easy Live. This event is a labor of love and we work hard to bring the best of Media and Tech under the same roof.
The last 15 spots are available at this link with readers of SME getting 15% off on all passes. Hope to see you on the 10th!
