Why we built our own ticketing instead of renting one

If you sell access to a livestream through the usual stack, you are paying three companies. A streaming platform charges a monthly fee plus bandwidth. A ticketing provider takes a per-ticket cut, typically somewhere between 2 and 10 percent plus a flat fee per order. A payment processor takes roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on top of that.

For a small event those fees are annoying. For a 400-ticket regional combat sports card sold as pay-per-view, they are a meaningful fraction of what the promoter clears, and they come out before the production gets paid.

That arithmetic is why we built our own.

What was actually broken

Three specific things, none of which is really about money.

The money sat somewhere else. Ticketing platforms hold the gate and settle on their own schedule, often 5 to 30 days out. A promoter who needs to pay a venue deposit on Monday does not care that the tickets sold on Saturday.

Nobody owned the failure. When a stream drops during a paid event, the production company says it is the platform, the platform says it is the encoder, and the promoter is refunding tickets while both of them investigate. There is no version of that conversation that helps the person whose event just went down.

The replay evaporated. This is the one most people miss. A stream ends, the link dies, and the revenue stops. For youth and school athletics especially that is backwards, because families keep buying the replay for weeks. Grandparents in another state. The kid who wants to watch their own match. Coaches reviewing tape. Leaving that on the table is a bigger loss than the fee percentages ever were.

What we changed

The platform at stream.avp.live does ticketing, the paywall, the live stream, and the replay library as one thing.

The payout terms are in writing before a ticket sells. The revenue split and the settlement schedule are agreed up front, not imposed by a platform after the fact. We are a production company that runs the platform, so we are not in the business of surprising anybody about their gate.

One phone number. When something goes wrong mid-event, you are calling the crew standing at your venue, not opening a support ticket with a vendor in another time zone. That is worth more than the fee difference and it is the part promoters mention afterward.

The replay stays up and stays purchasable. The event page does not die when the broadcast ends. This is the single largest revenue change for most of the events we run, and it costs nothing extra to enable, because the recording already exists.

Ticket tiers, promo codes, and comps are built in. Fighter codes, early bird, family bundles, comped seats for sponsors. These are not enterprise features, they are how regional events actually sell, and having them means the event page can start selling before we ever load in.

How access and replay actually work

The mechanics are simpler than three separate vendors make them feel. A promo code or ticket tier is a rule attached to the event page: a fighter or team gets a code that waives the price, an early-bird rate expires on a set date, a family bundle covers a fixed number of screens under one purchase. None of that needs a developer standing by during the event. It gets configured on the event page before doors, the same way the tiers themselves do.

On the viewing side, a ticket opens the event page, not a single device or a single sitting. Someone who buys access can watch live, close the tab, and come back for the replay without buying twice, which matters more than it sounds, because plenty of people start a stream on a phone in a parking lot and finish it on a television that night.

Questions promoters ask before they switch

What happens if the stream drops mid-event? The recording keeps rolling even when the live stream does not, because they are two separate outputs from the same encoder. Viewers see a gap. The archive usually does not, and picking the live stream back up once the connection issue is fixed is a normal part of running one.

Can someone buy only the replay, after the event is over? Yes. The event page and the paywall stay live indefinitely, so a replay-only purchase works exactly like a ticket purchase, just later, and it is where a meaningful share of the revenue on a given event actually lands.

Do you set the refund policy, or does the promoter? The promoter does. We configure whatever policy they want at setup, including no refunds once the event starts, which is standard for pay-per-view sports and avoids arguing about it during the show.

When you should not use us

Honest answer, because there is one.

If your event is free, use YouTube. It costs nothing, everyone already has it, and a paywall on a free event is just friction. We will happily produce your broadcast and push it to your YouTube channel, and we do that regularly.

If you are running a national event with tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, you want a CDN-scale platform with a support contract, not a regional production company. That is a different problem and we would tell you so.

The place we are the right answer is the middle: a regional event with a real paying audience, where the promoter is currently paying three vendors and still cannot get anyone on the phone when the stream hiccups.

The part that surprised us

We built this to solve a fee problem. The thing promoters actually talk about afterward is the replay.

We expected the pitch to be "keep more of your gate." In practice the conversation that lands is "your event keeps selling for three weeks after it ends," because most people running these events had genuinely never considered that the recording was an asset rather than an afterthought.

If you are producing something with a paid audience, tell us about it. We will be straight with you about whether this beats what you are doing now.