WGAN-TV HomePlan NZ Platform for Pay Per View (PPV) Service for Matterport 3D Tours with HomePlan NZ Director Scott MacKenzie (@HomePlanNZ) | Thursday, 14 May 2020

Transcript: WGAN-TV How to Make Money with HomePlan Pay Per View Service

Hi All,

Will non-profits, museums, galleries, historic locations and tourist destinations embrace Pay Per View (PPV) of Matterport 3D Tours as a way to generate revenue - particularly during COVID-19?

On WGAN-TV Live at 5 on Thursday, 14 May 2020, HomePlan NZ Director Scott MacKenzie (@HomePlanNZ) showed and told us about the HomePlan platform for Pay Per View (PPV) Service for Matterport 3D Tours.

Topics covered included:

✓ Demo of HomePlan Pay Per View (PPV) Service example (Old Jail Museum in Petone)
✓ Discussion of likely uses cases for PPV (non-profits, museums, attractions)
✓ Marketing: Open your doors to a new world of online visitors
✓ HomePlan PPV user entry fee/one use code (planned options, including multi-currency)
✓ HomePlan PPV feature: duration of viewing experience
✓ Embedding of Tour and dedicated access page provided by HomePlan
✓ HomePlan PPV planned features: multiple ticket, currency conversion, auto-add applicable local tax
✓ How long to implement? (ordering workflow)
✓ PPV viewing experience best practices (discussion of MatterTags, Labels, Video, Highlight Reel)
✓ Compatible with MP/embed links
✓ Use of MP/embed to annotate space; add background music, position-activated narration
✓ Use of HomePlan automation for exporting and importing MatterTags
✓ HomePlan PPV pricing options: Standard and Premium
✓ How to order HomePlan PPV
✓ Future: other 3D/360 Virtual Tour platforms

HomePlan PPV leverages the Matterport API and SDK.

WGAN Forum Related Discussions

✓ WGAN Forum discussions tagged: HomePlan | PPV
✓ Transcript: WGAN-TV: Automating Exporting & Importing Matterport MatterTags
✓ WGAN-TV Training U: Automating Exporting & Importing Matterport MatterTags

Best,

Dan

HomePlan NZ Links

✓ HomePlanNZ Website
✓ HomePlanNZ Instagram
✓ HomePlan NZ Facebook

Video: HomePlan PPV 3D Virtual Tours | Video courtesy of HomePlanNZ YouTube Channel | 13 April 2020

Transcript (Video at the Top)

- Hi, all I'm Dan Smigrod Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, May 14th, 2020, and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5 We have a great show for you today. It's Pay Per View service for Matterport 3D virtual tours. And our guest today is Scott MacKenzie. Hey Scott. Good to see you again.

- Good to be here. Thanks, Dan.

- Scott is the Director of HomePlan NZ. And if you're from New Zealand, that would be NZ in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Scott's been on the show with us before. We'll talk about that a little later.

Today we're going to jump into Pay Per View service for Matterport 3D virtual tours. Scott, why don't we start with a, demo. Let's take a look at one of your Pay Per View tours. So we understand what we're talking about for today's show.

- Yep. Sounds good. I'll share that screen then. There we go. Have you got that screen up?

- [Dan] Yup.

- [Scott] So thanks Dan, for having us here again, we'll start maybe for, for viewers to understand, what we're talking about before we get into the detail of it.

What's a quick walk through from the, user's perspective. so the screen that we're showing at the moment, it's a relatively straight forward marketing screen, really. So I mentioned this was a customer's website, be it a museum exhibition, whatever it happens to be. And it's a page that they would implement to sort of present that there is a online experience that can be accessed from here.

The example that we're using here is the Old Jail Museum. Now that say, heritage building, we have here in Lower Hutt, and it's set up to give a bit of insight into the law and order as it was practiced in New Zealand a hundred years ago, from the user perspective, they want to know what this is all about.

So there's a couple of things on this page. One being the ability to have a free preview of the tour, which I will take you into shortly. And then there's the ability to actually go ahead pitches to take it and start the complete virtual tour. Now as type of view on virtual tourism, relatively new concept.

In fact, as far as where we are, we're the first to put this together, it's useful to describe to the potential audience what the going to get.

So in this case, we have just a couple of screenshots of the venue and what they will see once they go in there. We talk a little bit about as to who the host of this, venue is. And, in this case, it's a charitable society and they are going to use the funds raised from Pay Per View to help them support their heritage buildings. Then just jumping down, you can see here, we just described to the user what's included on the tour.

So we give them a bit of a guidance as to how long we think it would take the average visitor to explore. In this case, this is about a teen to 20 minutes, to that's how long we would expect someone to have a look around and experience all that, items or experiences with them. Then on top, we say, even though it only will take you 10, 20 minutes, when you buy a ticket at grants, a user access for up to 90 minutes. So you've got time to step away, grab a cup of coffee, come back in.

If you need to, it tells you once you buy your ticket, you need to activate it within 24 hours of purchase, and it gives you how you're able to pay for this online.

And of course, what the entry fee is. So again, this isn't an hour Pay Per View system. This is just a simple mock-up of a page that a host would put up to, to promote that a tour exists. Do you want me to jump into that now then?

- [Dan] Yeah. Maybe we can take a look at that free preview.

- [Scott] Okay. Yeah. People are used to virtual tours being used as a gateway through to a value proposition. I know that sounds very technical.

If you're wanting to sell a house, then, the payback is the sale of the house, the virtual tours, the why you make it happen, this is a slightly different mindset and that the value we're trying to derive as the experience of the virtual tour itself. So it's a good idea to put a free preview up, which gives you the ability for them to get a bit of a taste of what they're paying for. So here we are. Now I am going to stop talking just briefly cause there is narration and this particular tour.

- [Voiceover] Welcome to this preview of the Petone Old Jail, 3D virtual tour, the entry to the jail is around the right of the main building.

- [Scott] So what we're currently looking at as a, Matterport 3D tour with MP/embed, As an overlay on it, it has all the standard functions here at is just at this stage.

We're not within Pay Per View, we're just showing what is going to be in the Pay Per View You can do all the normal things. You can do an, a virtual tour in terms of zooming and walking around and the like, and this case, for this to we use MP/embed's, description features and narration features

- [VO] in 1840 Petone became the first European settlement in New Zealand.

- [Scott] So I'm just going to skip ahead here and jumped down towards the particular tour

- [VO] built in 1908, the location in 1993, a new police station was opened in Jackson Street. In 1990. Please select the link on the tag in front of you to purchase your ticket. And then explore the Petone Old Jail Museum.

- Thank you "My Dear" we've skipped through, the first part of the experience there, just to show people how this particular virtual tour has constructed the tour itself is through this particular door. You'll notice I can't go in, I've gone as far as I can.

And I have the ability here to click on a, a MatterTag which will take us through to purchase the ticket and begin the actual, virtual tour. so this type of preview as a good way of, outlining to a potential paying customer, what they're going to get before they actually enter into that tour. Dan, should I just, I'm likely to go very quickly cause I know the stuff very well. Do you have any questions before I jump ahead further?

- [Dan] I'm, kind of torn between whether we should click on the MatterTag in order to activate or go back to the landing page. I, how about we go back to the landing page and look at that and we'll presume that button would do the same thing. ...

And Scott, in terms of that, Matterport 3D Tour preview, are there two different tours, that are provided to you? One is the, is exactly what we saw could not walk past the front door and then the full tour that's provided, for the Pay Per View?

- [Scott] So everything you see on this first page is, as a advice and developments that either the host can do, or the 3D technician, the person who's producing the scan can provide for them. Yes, the preview as set prep tour, that's basically we encourage the 3D technician to take two versions of the tour, and then process them differently to restrict access.

We don't need to have that within our Pay Per View system. Cause we haven't actually got to our page view system yet. We're just articulating maybe a few of the techniques we would suggest that people use to help market and gain the paying customer.

- [Dan] Okay. Sounds great. I'm ready to, Pay Per View.

- [Scott] Okay. So I'm going to hit, Purchase Ticket and Start Your 3D Tour, and this is the gateway where we switch over from being on the host's website, opening up and to, the paper view system that we've developed, just to quickly orientate you on the screen.

What we're looking at is a description of the tour that's been provided, it has a backdrop, that's just static image again that the host can provide. It can be whatever they want it to be.

We're a, window that has minimal branding and I'll, come back to why maybe it needs to have HomePlan on it, when it comes to tickets house, but it's actually able to be configured, for example, this could be the hosts logo, and can say other things in 3D Tours at the top. So it's designed to be very clean and simple,

- [Dan] Scott, excuse me, is this your landing page on behalf of the client? So you control this page, you design ... HomePlan designs this landing page with the artwork text input from the client.

- [Scott] Correct. So we spend a bit of time with the client understanding what the experience is, how long it would take and how best to proceed.

And this is a standard format page that was really the gateway into, the Pay Per View, engine that we've built. So at can under, with some customization, we'll come back to that later. As I mentioned at the top that could have the client's logo at the top. So very much looks like it's part of their site. But this is the point we've changed over. And you'll note that we're actually on a HomePlan site, up in the URL now.

- Okay.

- Other little features we have added in here, there is some user tips they're provided, the terms and conditions of use and a way if there are any issues, when they're playing with the tour, they can have a look at known issues. There are some very small ones in Lithuania that we found, Or they can contact us to do those things. So we provide a bit of guidance to before they get through the paywall.

I'm sorry, I'm coming back to the specifics of this tour. Thus you say as a summary of what was on the previous page, that we are about to go into the Old Jail Museum with a short description of it.

The tour time ins 10-20 minutes, but the ticket lasts for 90 minutes and must be used in 24 hours. We have an entry fee we'll come back, maybe to the currencies available for that.

And they can proceed here and go through and purchase a ticket, when they hit this button here opens up a paywall. So this is as you see a standard people will be used to seeing the credit card type options, where they enter their details. They enter their credit card details and click purchase. And when they go through that process, they'll receive a, electronic receipt.

It'll be emailed to them. They'll immediately receive a ticket code, that will be in the email, but also come straight back into this interface so they can use it to start the term. I'm not going to proceed and pay on this one.

- [Dan] I was hoping to watch your credit card be entered there ;-)

- [Scott] you might be disappointed at the results.

- [Dan] Okay. So I see that you just pasted the activation code.

- [Scott] Correct. So had they proceeded and made the payment, they would have been returned to the screen and the code would have been automatically entered there. Ready to go. And you'll notice it's done a quick check of that code and told us it's okay.

And it's given us a bit of a reminder that once you start activating it to, you can use it for 90 minutes from that point in time. So would you like me to go and hit now and start the tour there?

- [Dan] Okay.

- [Scott] Then just to be really sure that we give them a secondary message, are you sure this starts the tour and activates your ticket? Have you got your coffee? Are you ready to go? And this case use, we are. So you say there's just a discreet change has happened to the screen. Now we've gone to a darker background. We have a, the tour itself opening

- [VO] welcome to the Petone Old Jail, 3D virtual tour. The entry to the jail is around the right of the main building come on around.

- so a couple of features you'll see, have appeared. One is that we're working with an a window here and that window, as exactly as you would expect to see when you're normally using a Matterport or MP/embed overlaid, tour. ... All the standard functions.

Again, the things that are a little bit different. One as you see at the top here, we have a timer. so it's currently counting down from one hour, 30 minutes or 90 minutes. That's the time that we told the user that they had to experience this tour.

And now that clock continuous from the time they activate the ticket. So if they were to close this browser window and, come back and open that ticket up again, and a half hour's time, then a half hour would have come off that clock. It's not continuous use it's from the time they activate the ticket.

And really that's designed as this is for a person to sit down and experience this into end. And that is what they're paying for. Having the ability to come back tomorrow or 3Days later would necessitate another ticket. Just like if you were visiting in person. Some other features you'll see on this page, you'll see there's a little warning up in the corner.

This is for the naughty red button up on the corner, that's designed when you're finished. So if you have explored the place and you want to end your ticket and you do not want to come back again, and if you come back again, you buy another ticket, you hit this red button in the corner, and it's pretty good at warning you when you go there, to only hit it, if you're really sure.

Some other things in this window, you see, you can still full screen.

As you can have normal Matterport, all the normal help buttons and things work, within, as you would have within a tour, you still have, if you need them basic information, some of the features you've see here, and I'm just going to, sorry, I've got screens in front of screens. I'm just going to jump into the tour to avoid some of that narration we've already heard now.

- [VO] In 1993, here we are ... This cell has been converted into the museum's entrance. Please take the time to read the stories presented on the various boards around the room.

- So if you compare this to the demonstration, you couldn't come into the spa. And the other example, now you can, and, you can, as you came with any tour, go for a bit of a wander and have a look around this tour and...

- [VO] Check out a fine workmanship and years of wear & tear on these two-inch thick cell doors.

- Now, what you'll notice, Dan, in this tour is that, we have spent the time to enrich the content so that ... a user is engaged, and rather than just looking at 3D imagery, they can explore, they can pause to read or to listen to narration.

They can basically treat it as if they were there in person. And generally convert from just a 3D walk-around, if you like, and to an experience that's worthy of spending in this case, 10 to 20 minutes of your time, and this case, the posters on the wall, the storytelling, or it's even though they are relatively visible within the 3D having them in there, using MatterTags, as high quality image means you can actually spend some time looking at them and, reading them.

A similar concept applies, for video, in this case, the secular venue has been used for the Christmas parades and things in the area. So they asked... to the, Christmas events that were held there, as a YouTube video.

So we've done that as well. So, aside from those things, you'll probably get the feeling that this just starts to look and feel like Matterport and that's kind of the point really, it shouldn't be complicated, it shouldn't be different. It's just the ability for you to go through that tour and have a look around and spend some time...

- [VO] The display. And they sell shows a series of photographs depicting views of Jackson Street. From 1900 to 1930.

- This particular tour is quite short. That is relatively small, but hopefully then you can see the applications. If you were...

- [VO] In this cell, you can read about the world war one, peace celebrations.

- sorry. I keep interrupting here. If we were in a larger venue, you'd see the applications and how, what here might be a 10 to 20 minute experience. I could easily be an hour, two hour experience and a full blown art museum or exhibition.

- So this is great. We've seen examples of MatterTags, And then with using MP/embed, a overlay for Matterport Showcase, the ability to add narration: it's activated as you step on that puck that scan.

- Yes. as a starting point, people's experience of 3D virtual tours, as often as a way of promoting something else. So I mentioned before you want to sell your house, get a virtual tour, it'll engage people and hopefully lead to a successful sale. So the payback becomes the sale of the house. I'm using 3D tours, for venue-hire, exhibitions. Often it's presenting a snippet or a taste of what that's like to encourage someone to come and attend in person. And the payback comes when they attend in person and pay a higher fee or a rental fee or eat at that restaurant. This is a different mindset. This is where the virtual experience is the payback, it's what the person is paying to do and see. sorry.

- Do you have some, categories that you think are best, use cases for Pay Per View?

- Yeah sure. I think the most, the strongest use case, or it's probably two side-by-side, number one is museums. Now museums are often, government funded. They, often charge a small entry fee to help cover their overheads.

They capture our heritage. They, show things that are of interest to us and, you don't tend to go to a museum every day, but certainly when you go to a different city or country, you tend to be drawn to that type of venue to learn a bit more about the culture.

Now, it's tough times with COVID-19 and many of those venues are shut for some-time and a travel is very restricted. So, I've been lucky enough to, have been to the Louvre Museum and France.

If I wanted to go today, I couldn't. So having a museum, that has a large floor space is a big opportunity, for a 3D technician to capture it, and then enrich it and then give the ability of that museum to show it. It's we as to a global audience, and ultimately generate some revenue or some payback for doing that. In addition to all the other benefits of having a digital record of those types of environments, hand-in-hand with that use case would be exhibitions very similar.

The point of an exhibition is to draw people in, to experience, to look, to read, to understand, talk about it. And often that is, in return for an entry fee, very hard to do, in a COVID-19 world.

So again, having an exhibition prepared and, having it, presented digitally and returned for a small fee as a way for them to gain that payback, that they desperately need

- So this is like two or three categories, museums, historic locations, exhibitions. Are there other categories that you think play well for Pay Per View?

- Certainly any tourist destination destination, that's able to be converted as long as it can be enriched so that someone wants to spend some time in there digitally or virtually it's worth doing. I'll jump to a, quite a separate use case, which is charity fundraising.

And that may be a virtual walk through where, and I don't mean this in any negative light, but it might not be a big museum or a big exhibition.

It might just be a house that's been decked out with a whole lot of Christmas surprises on it. And it's to raise funds for the local, orphanage or cancer society or something of the like, that's another great use for paper view and that you can encourage the supporters of that cause to come online and rather than just make a donation, they get something in return for that.

- You know, I would say in the United States, my impression is a tour of homes to benefit Charity is really a big category.

There are a number of Matterport Service Providers that have talked about, scanning homes for that purpose. I think interestingly, sometimes; this happens with museums & exhibitions as well. There's some pushback of, "Oh, we don't want to show the museum or the historic site or the exhibition because we want people to come in person.

So we don't want them two experience our space for free. We want them to come to our space." So I think you've actually solved two or three puzzles. The first is now that objection goes away because you have a way to charge for the Matterport; the viewing of the Matterport tour. Second, I think that a HomePlan has enabled ... ...

I think about, well, you and I have been lucky enough to go to the Louvre in Paris. But there are a lot of people that either aren't in driving distance with the Louvre or they can't afford to travel, yet they want to go see that museum.

And so I think your PPV ... the HomePlan Pay Per View service actually enables the museum, the historic site, the home tour to go beyond driving distance, beyond flying distance to be able to attract a larger audience and maybe have virtual admissions, and both probably carry out the vision and mission of the nonprofit while at the same time generating revenue.

And I know you've mentioned COVID-19, I suspect that, that really this Pay Per View solution, will continue well beyond COVID-19. I'm certainly thinking of you know, those home shows, the tour of homes in the United States as an example of; WOW! What a great compliment that now the non-profit has two ways to have people tour the homes. So if you can't tour in person, you can still tour.

- Yeah, absolutely. Are our view. coming into this week, we launched the idea of a Pay Per View last year. And, got it into our strategic planning. We accelerated when the pandemic came along, the missing jigsaw piece has been, how do I, how do I monetize or how do I get payback for a digital presentation of a space? So, again, using a museum, as an example, you can stand outside and admire the architecture for free.

You can often come in the door for free, and you can often see a number of levels of exhibitions or displays for free, but then they'll have the content that you have to pay that $20 to go and have a look at. And that's all designed to draw you in.

So that eventually they have a way of, either covering their overheads, if it's a charitable endeavor or making profit up, it's a for profit endeavor. So what we've managed to do now is, give them that option in the virtual space where you can absolutely still present things for free. You can absolutely give a taste of things for free, but you can also with the right enrichment, provide a paid experience in there that, that allows you to monetize

- Cool. Other, categories of use cases, kinds of use cases? A charity ... non-profit - that kind of transcends all kinds of spaces. Anything else that resonates for Pay Per View,

- Tourism as another crossover spot. That's a bit similar to museums and the like we have. But just by example, we have venues here in New Zealand that were specifically targeted for the foreign visitors, the tourists to see when they visited New Zealand. The ability to, to re-enable those, given that our borders remained closed in the meantime.

And beyond that come show that travel will be, restricted for a number of years to come. But, it exhibitions museums, tourist destinations, charitable causes, and, in the future, remembering that what sits behind all this as a layer of security so that your tour is safe and, people can sort of copy it and fairly distributed, that in itself will open it up to other applications in the future I think.

- I guess I'm thinking, I've shot a museum in Atlanta. I've shot a historic, location in Athens, Georgia. I think it's, you know, it's interesting because it says, Oh, maybe there's another use case to be able to go back to a client and say, you know, I you didn't want to have us do the entire museum before because you were concerned about that. No one would visit.

So I think I would spark that in Matterport Service Providers watching our show today to say, "Hey, what clients have you already shot that this might inspire an opportunity to go back and have a different kind of conversation."

- Yeah. And there's, a couple of categories within that. Isn't there, Dan, one is they might have, had a tour done to give a taste.

And now my opportunity to turn that taste into the whole meal, go back and shoot the whole location. The second is even on an existing walkthrough to enrich it. Rather than it being just a piece of digital interest to some guy, Oh yeah. Here's that place around the corner. I'll go for a quick walk. Oh, that was fun.

And then move on with the day. As we've done in the old jail example, create content that engages them, take them on a bit of a journey, tell them a story, allow them to click on things, allow them to read additional content, see photos, but all those enrichment things that can be done within a Matterport tour And what it will do is change occasional visitor, who might've spent two, three, four minutes out of curiosity, looking at it to someone who spends a good half hour exploring that place and coming away thinking well, that was a really worthwhile half hour. I learned a lot in that time.

So, that presents an opportunity for those who are creating the tours, because someone has to do that work.

- I'm going to come back later and ask you a question that that sparks on a different topic. But, I noticed when we walked through the Old Jail Museum in Petone, New Zealand, that there were a lot of MatterTags with a lot info. I am thinking as a Matterport Service Provider, knowing how labor-intensive it is ...

Now thinking about a much bigger space; a museum that may have hundreds of paintings, my heart's a little bit frightened about managing all that, data. you were a guest on our show talking about, HomePlan exporting and importing MatterTags. How about just giving us a few minutes about how that relates since it seems so relevant to historic sites and museums.

- Sure. and, and of course, when you, sit back and consider the different things at HomePlan done with MatterTags Pay Per View and, the Open Archive, you'd say that they're all fit together. There's a reason why we've developed these things cause they will have a relationship to each other. so you're right.

On a large-scale, scan or project, you may have literally hundreds of those MatterTags to create. And within the standard Matterport interface at a point and click add type and content we'll paste in content very slow. It's also extremely slow if you are linking images because it has this little lag as it sort or buffers those images through.

So it's easy to spend a good 60 seconds per tag. And even that's probably when you're going at full speed to get them in there. So we have a, separate service, our tag input service, where that data can be assembled.

And a .csv file, an Excel based file, and we can run a test and, drop them into the model. And if we comfortable, we can then permanently apply them and save them into that model. And that an averages, if you just add up all the time, it takes to, drops you down to about 15 seconds per MatterTag rather than 60 seconds of period takes a, quite a time saving.

- So this is the ... Thank you, Scott. This is the HomePlan, a service for importing and exporting Matterport MatterTags.

Scott and I did an entire show on this topic. If you go to ... if you're watching on our YouTube channel or elsewhere, if you go to the, We Get Around Network Forum, a WGANForum.com and you can either type in the search box MatterTags or HomePlan, search for the show.

It's a deep-dive into the use of, Matterport MatterTags ... of importing and exporting Matterport MatterTags. And it actually makes doing museums possible without the pain and suffering of what adding 400 MatterTags manually would, feel like.

Scott let's jump into, pricing. Okay. you showed me Pay Per View. What's this going to cost me, or what's this going to as a Service Provider or what's this going to cost the muse museum; historic site; attraction; the gallery; the non-profit?

- So I'm just pulling up our outgo virtual page, which is our site within our global services to explain it... ...

- Let point this out while you're here, you're on homeplan.NZ/global-services or select the tab up at the top that says global. And that's how you ended up picking ... Pay Per View out of that menu. And, and that's the page that we're on. Okay, great.

- Great. And given that we are, innovating in this space, I'm fairly sure if you start Googling things like Matteport Pay Per View will be at the top of the list there. So... ...

- Today's Thursday, May 14th, 2020. Scott, as far as I know, HomePlan is the only Pay Per View solution for Matterport 3D tours. So, to your point, Google Pay Per View Matterport, you're going to end up on the HomePlan page.

- So this, particular site does give you a short video that just explains it and takes you through the screenshots and the, like, I'll leave you to explore that. But you asked about pricing. We talked through here much, like we talked through what's involved, and a few hints as to what we recommend you do to enhance the visual experience.

We've actually done a full article this week on this gives you a few more ideas to think about. And it was, would come down to pricing.

I guess the first comment before we talk about the service as the question of "How much should I charge?" So it's completely up to the host, the person who's engaging us to decide the entry fee, and, what the payback is.

It's going to take a bit of trial and error, I think, to get that math right, but ultimately the richer the experience for the visitor, the higher, the value proposition for them.

And that was what will determine the entry fee. what is it going to cost you? So we've got two options here and our pricing has done per transaction. So every visitor, rather than having a monthly subscription fee or a setup fee or all that has, you know, free set up. But as the visitors come through, we deduct a fee off the entry each time.

And there's a good reason for that. our fee, in fact, a very high percentage... ... if they as actually the, Stripe payment phase, they're getting could, anytime you use a credit card online, and it's the best way to structure this so that a few, don't have many visitors. You don't pay much at all.

And, if you get a number of visitors, then of course we get the payback for our service. And are you getting that, the reminder of that entry fee. So using a very simple example, if you were to charge a $10 entry fee or just under $9.99, we would be deducting our, our transaction fee from that. And you get in the region of $8 or just under, as a net proceeds from that particular visitor. This is the standard, version of the service. So, there is also a, premium version ...

- If you could stay on the service pricing for standard Pay Per View standard. And the print may be a little bit small for those watching on a smartphone. Maybe you could go through with those bullet points are.

- sure that might help a little bit. so under our standard service there, I've just noticed I need to, correct. one of the fees there, we'll, focus up here, $1.49 plus 5%, free set up. So we'll guide you through the process too, to have your Per Per View go online, it can actually be done relatively quickly.

It's more about the advice that goes with it to make sure you get the maximum bang for your buck. If the tour is not popular, then no fees are incurred.

Under this option, we do a monthly payout and to the hosts Stripe account of the net proceeds. And of course, as mentioned, this fee covers the Stripe transaction fees that are incurred on the transaction.

We do however, require that, for a Pay Per View for us to host it longterm, it needs to have visitors. Can't sit there with no visitors. So a minimum of five paying business per month to continue to be viable. We just monitor that and just start talking about it if it's not hitting those numbers.

- Okay. And so what do I get for premium?

- So under premium, you get the same, set up as the standard. We also within that offer to host the 3D tour. So it sits on our accounts. So there isn't any hosting fee associated with that, and we move up to a weekly, the payment cycle. So this is designed for the higher throughput type to us.

The other advantage under premium, I mentioned before at the top of the Pay Per View, there's a HomePlan logo. We can actually change that to being the host's logo. So it's not quite, white label, but it's very close to being white labeled branded for it.

And it's just a slightly higher requirement, 10 paying visitors per month to make it viable. again, because then we need to cover the hosting costs of that to.

- Great. While we're on this page, how about sliding up and let, let's talk about the summary of the best practices. what, what are, HomePlan a NZ recommendations for the best virtual tour Pay Per View experience?

- So just running through these are bullet points that are on the screen at the moment, and by the way, these, are things that we can do, but we actually encourage the 3D technician who's working directly with the host to do them.

Because that's, we're here to help build your business, create some work, for post production week call much, once the scan has been captured.

So, first as to, remove all the distractions and focus on what the visitors and for, it's not about having the most scan points, it's not about, allowing them to go into the laundry, or into the toilets. It's about what does a visitor want to experience here? So they don't, you don't want the visitor to be confused. You want them to take a logical sequence through a particular place, unless of course the whole purpose of the walkthrough is for them to explore.

We, were delighted to have a six story abandoned castle. There was a Lithuanian example I mentioned, which was brilliant just to explore and go around, but ultimately only include the things in there that you think, a visitor is going to want to do or say. Then on top of that, as you saw, in the example, we gave enrichment, use Matterport labels, tags, videos, images, Highlight Reel all those things work within the Pay Per View, use them to help guide them through and, sort of spend a bit more time exploring.

I love the quality of Matterport 3D scanning, however, if it is a scan of a placard or a poster, it's actually a bit grainy to read. It's not designed for that purpose. Much better to let them click on a button and get the clear text or a clear image of that stuff.

And that runs onto the next point, insure that it is visible. And, I think, well, we'll see through the services, our current walkthroughs that may have not many tags, we'll now have a hundred tags of them. As people adopt this topic practice, get the stuff that they want to see and make sure it's visible. I'm a great supporter of Chris Hickman and MP/embed. We use it a lot, not just an exhibitions and museums;

We use us and lots of operational cases because you can do so much with us on top of standard Matterport. And you saw some of the features ... to me that they're almost mandatory.

We've got other tours that run background music while you're going all the way through. You saw the activated by position; activated narration and additional comments. It's just absolutely brilliant. And plus, With MP/embed, you can do things like change color settings, shot-by-shot: allows you to fine tune ...

- And, I'll point out that, we Get Around has done: WGAN-TV has done a show with a MP/embed Developer Chris Hickman. So again, you can find that in the, We Get Around Network Forum, just a, do the search box MPEMBED without that slash. MPEMBED. I think that would be great in the search box. Read more about him MP/embed.

- And the final point, Dan, is ... creating digital content and putting it on the web is like throwing a diamond in the ocean.

It's, really important to promote what you do. Don't expect to create a Pay Per View virtual tour, and publish it once on Facebook and enable them to flock to it. Just like promoting a physical venue. It takes time and effort.

So, all the normal things you do to promote around paid advertising, Google Adwords, I'm wrapping the website around it. So it leads them into that purchase point as all very, very important.

- Cool. Scott, can you talk a little bit about maybe some features that you haven't talked about, but are coming, coming soon, perhaps?

- Yeah. We've got some stuff, happening right now and I'll please don't quote me, but it should be this month is what we're aiming to get this back to the market. We launched very quickly. We launched very quickly because we saw, the need out there. And we also know it's going to take time for people to understand the concept of Pay Per View and get their tours ready for it.

The first release has a couple of restrictions on it. That's out there at the moment that we're now have some enhancements in development. The first exciting improvement that we've ... got coming as support for our CAPTUR3D so captured as a separate overlay, provided out of Australia by Steve and the team.

- Okay! This is CAPTUR3D ... and again you can read all about CAPTUR3D in that We Get Around Network Forum. And I also had Steven Kounnas One of the co-founders on the show, for an entire week, talking about all the features of CAPTUR3D because it really is a Swiss army knife, content management system, amazing solution. Yeah.

- And that solution has a very nice and smooth, front-end capability. That's also integrates with all those great Matterport features we talked about. So that support for that platform is coming very soon. But the biggest, requests that we've had, and that we now have in development have actually seen it working as multi-currency support.

So the first version that we released was restricted to U.S. dollars only.

So we now have the ability to coming to select any currency that you would like, on that tour and it will charge ... in that currency, which allows you to localize, the, your audience and what they're expecting to say. And that includes, automatic management of our sales tax on the front team, which is a very complicated, topic. But with sales tax, is include automatically add that to the price.

- And will this, the sales tax, the appropriate sales tax be remitted to the appropriate agency, or is it just collected? And, you can run a report on how much money you owe whichever agency it is that, tax is due?

- We could probably do a week-long set of segments on the application of sales tax to digital services worldwide. I've learned a lot about it in the last few months. I'll ultimately,

I'll keep this really brief. The sale of the ticket is a contract between, the purchaser and HomePlan, therefore the, what determines if sales tax is due ... ... or not as the location and the tax status of HomePlan and that location. So with the enhancement that's coming through, that'll get automatically worked out. So if you are in New Zealand, I will add GST tax to it.

If you are in the UK or in Europe, we are registered for VAT and that area, if you are in the US our system will tell us if we have a, it's called a nexus for sales tax arrive, and we need to register in that state. So, basically, yeah, I know. Scott laughs ;-)

- I know this is super-important, because we all want to be, you know, stay legal, but boy, can this make your eyes glaze over? So I'm super-excited that it sounds like you figured out the puzzle. And so for the end user, if they're charging eight dollars US or eight Euros, if there's a tax or a tariff or an excise tax or whatever it might be, it'll automatically be added to the price of that ticket.

- Correct. And then as we sit up each tour with each agent and each country will have that specific conversation with them as to the tax status that needs to be applied to,

- Okay. You know, Scott, we have a professional transcript service, that transcribes, our shows that we put in the We Get Around Network Forum; So I may have to spell out for them the sound of what that is to go on our transcript. They illustrate the story...

- Let's move on to something more exciting. So, we have two other, enhancements coming through, this month, one is multi-ticket purchase. At the moment, you can purchase one ticket, with the new interface, for the payments you can select to buy 50 tickets and get 50 tokens for a school group virtual trip. ... ...

- Pause there; because that's a whole nother application. I think that's brilliant because I mean, while you were talking about non-profits or I say, you talk about a museum or a gallery or an exhibition or a historic location or tourist destination, then there's something that slices through that is two dimensional that I would say, now you apply non-profit on top of that.

That becomes interesting. And I think now you added a third dimension to this, as soon as you say, multi-ticket sales to be used for school groups. Because I think that ...

I think it's really important as a Matterport Service Provider that we say that to our museum. Imagine, having group ticket sales to the school. And you have special pricing for them, we can accommodate that. We can run off those tickets for that group. ... So, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Super excited.

- Yeah. That's a big one. And it was, between multi-currency support and, multi-ticket. That was our primary feedback from, those who were involved in the beta testing and in the early stages so that we listened and it's, on its way.

- Okay. Other features coming soon?

- Oh, we've got one other, which has been included in this might sound like a small thing for now, but also opens up additional applications. And it sounds a little bit funny.

We're, including the ability to have a free Pay Per View tour. Now that, the application there, of course one is just, as people are signing up, we want to give them the ability to look at it without incurring the cost as set up the system. Didn't do that for version. It does, it Version two, but if I jumped back a step and it starts to lead into the sort of HomePlan Open Archive service that we're developing ...

The really cool thing about the Pay Per View platform that we've delivered is that it conceals the URL of the Matterport model. So if you intend to have a model, you want to be able to give people access to it, but on your terms, you don't want them to copy that URL and take it elsewhere.

The Pay Per View platform does that sort of at its heart. Now that has lots of applications in the world, doesn't it?

Because the ability to restrict distribution and models as very poor at the moment, the public/private functions you have are not, very exhaustive. So, we are moving in a direction that may in future, let us have this type of platform be used for access to restricted models, but not on a Pay Per View basis.

- That works for me. That sounds very exciting. Any, any particular, top three use cases of that? I can't share the types of models we do that need that requirement for exact reasons as to why they need that requirement, but our government installations in any place that you want to have a digital record of, but you can't have it free for the year.

And you can't risk, someone just getting the URL and taking it forward. I mean, there's ... I don't know what percentage of people's business that is out there, but for us, it's a good percentage of our businesses and that category...

- I think it's very interesting. I mean, I'll suggest when, you go shoot the, set of a TV show or a movie, and you want to make it free it's companion content for the cable channel to say, "Hey, take a backstage tour," but you don't necessarily want to charge.

On the other hand, you don't necessarily want everybody to have access to that. You only want them to view it on the cable channel's website. Would that be an example of an application?

- Yeah, absolutely. So, the reason we put in there and thus release as to help people onboard to the Pay Per View service, but it also provides us a gateway in the future to providing a more about sort of monthly subscription type service for other applications. So we're still thinking.

- Okay, cool. What else is coming?

- Well, that's, what's in the pipeline at the moment. We're pretty keen to, work with some initial adopters and help them lift those models to their experience level and get it more popular once it's out there more than again, we'll just keep looking and see how else we can integrate.

- Okay. I think I have a wishlist item for Pay Per View. It would be, a gift card or e-gift card. And the way I think that might work is, I just experienced the tour. I was so excited. I wanted to share it with ____ And so, as I exit through the gift shop, I have the opportunity to per perhaps purchase.

Or, maybe even on the landing page where we first purchased the ticket. There's a box that says gift. And as soon as I click on the gift, it's going to send that ticket to someone else with some pre-message that I can maybe change to say, "Hey, love this experience so much. I just thought you'd want to, here's your ticket for you to go see it?

- And that could be facilitated now, or the majority of what you're asking for there, through the host's website. So when a Pay Per View tour ends when they click the big red button, or it runs out of time, it redirects them back to a nominated webpage on the hosts website. So that can be a "Thank You for Visiting" page. It can be a page with other offers. And of course, then that would allow us to have a coupon type set up there if we, if we wanted to.

- Okay, cool. I mean, the low tech, I can certainly purchase it, copy the code and email it and be done with it. But maybe to inspire people to actually gift the experience.

I think before we move on, the only thing that, I think I wanted to add to this experience so far is for all our Matterport Service Providers who are watching this show is think about what kind of content that you have created, that in this age of COVID-19 where people can't come, physically be someplace, maybe you already have the content that you can go back to your client and say, I know we made this free, but maybe there's some people who'd be willing to pay because you're closed and they're still supporters of, and you still need to make money, even though you're closed.

So, maybe they've, you've already shot a historic site or a museum or companion content that's been free for whatever reason, but maybe the client could still make it a Pay Per View. Maybe you still need to trick it out, in terms of more MatterTags and enhancement.

But you may already have the content and the motivation may be there that, that the non-profit that you shot the space for, once they give something to people making a donation ... So essentially you're selling tickets, whether they redeem the tickets and take the tour or not, you've still given them something of value to tour the space in exchange for making a donation, which is that buying the ticket ... buying that token?

- Absolutely. They, talking about Matterport Service Providers are I just call them 3D technicians. The state given that there are a lot of Matterport operators, are not Service Providers officially... Those that have been around for awhile and using the technology for all that.

They know all these capabilities. I know you can use tags and you can put images on but what they may have lacked as a client willing to pay for it. And, I'm speaking from the heart here, when you're out there doing scans of houses every day, and you put two or three tags in them to say, hello, and here's the oven. It can become a little bit mundane when you know, the platform can do a lot more.

So, the reason it was hard to then convince a museum or a venue to invest more in your time to do that enrichment is that there was no real payback for them for that additional investment. So now what we're saying is they can be saying, we'll create an experience. And what we want to create a sense of out there is virtual tours are cool. Virtual tours should be free for lots of things. virtual tours should be used for advertising. Virtual tours of cool places that people want to do for it should stay that way, because that helps us all along.

Create a new level of experience for your virtual tour, invest the time in it to make it something that someone stays in for 10, 20, 30 minutes, and there should be a payback generated for that. It's really as a platinum standard that you're aiming for to create that experience. And it's going to create an opportunity for lots of people who are struggling, to, monetize in today's world, to, call back

- Terrific, Scott, we talked about HomePlan, today's show about, the Pay Per View service, of Matterport 3D virtual tours. We talked briefly about the HomePlan Matterport exporting and importing automation service. You have something else coming, HomePlan Open Archive.

Could you speak, give us a tease. I know you're going to, you've graciously agreed to come back on our show, talk about Open Archive, but maybe you can give us a tease; a taste of what's coming.

- Yeah, absolutely. And I mentioned before, you'll see how all these things relate to the triangle of things that we're doing at the moment.

So at our next service that, we've got in development now is a service that is for high of availability, but low usage models. Again, we could spend a week talking about, Matterport licensing, how it's changed, what's fair, and what's not... ...

- That's a different show. So I got, I have a, need for 5,000 models. Maybe I needed to scan for insurance purposes, 5,000 locations. And I only need to look at those models in the event of a claim. I will tee that up as an example. What, does Open Archive do for me who has 5,000 models that only need to be viewed on demand; occasionally?

- So I, Open Archive, we'll let you have a concurrent total that you work to across those 5,000 models. So you might allow a hundred or 25 concurrent, models within that 5,000 to be active at one time, and, avoid you having to have all 5,000 of them active just in case you need them.

- So if Matterport is charging in tiers of up to 25 active models, up to 50, up to 100 models, then I literally could have 5,000 models, but only allow up to 100 to be active at any one time. So now, even though I have 5,000 models, I have a way two to keep my bill down based on how Matterport, presently charges.

- Correct.

- And I imagine there's some interesting way of calling up those models, on the front-end, without understanding anything about how Open Archive does this on the back-end.

- Yeah, correct. It's actually, for those who, have a peek inside Pay Per View, you'll see, there's some synergy there between what we've done for Pay Per View and what we're doing for Open Archive. That's a similar concept. You, go to a model, you request access, you get granted access, you use it for a limited time and then it closes off again.

So what we've built allows us to treat the active licensing model, to treat those active licenses as concurrent models.

- It's very exciting. So I imagine you're on all three of these applications, you're using the Matterport API, their SDK to accomplish this. So it's very exciting to see that 3rd-party, uses of, Matterport's, API SDK Scott, before we say "bye" anything, we haven't talked about that we should cover today. Anything I haven't asked you that I should've asked you?

- No, Dan. You're very thorough. And I always enjoy coming in talking to you because you, put on lots of lenses, which is what this needs, and, really, encourage people to, look into their local communities and see the applications that could come from this. Don't, expect to, grab a model you already have, and people just start paying to access it.

Think about the value, add that you, as an experienced 3D technician or Matterport Service Partner could be adding and develop a proposition around it.

And we'll, help you through, the only issue only area, sorry that I don't think we've covered. Dan is how you sign up. We do have a formal booking, set of forms coming. they're not here yet. Just contact us through our website. There's a page there to do that. It is relatively straightforward to get going because all the terms and conditions are online.

We'll talk you through the process as to what you can do and choosing how long a tour take it should last for all those things. And get you underway. It would, we could literally get you up and running within a day.

- Terrific. Scott, thanks again for being on the show.

- Absolutely. Thank you.

- We've been visiting with Scott McKenzie. Scott is the director of HomePlan NZ in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Also a, Matterport Service Provider. I think you're busy with five or six Matterport cameras, in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. And I think you just got the, okay.

That you're, can actually start scanning again, coming out of COVID-19. So, good news for you. So I should say stay safe. So for, for Scott McKenzie, I'm Dan Smigrod. Founder of the, we Get Around Network Forum and you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.