Seasonal Subscriptions

Introducing seasonal subscriptions to your offer can be a strategic move for your video platform. They can be a great fit when your broadcasting content is tied to specific seasons or events, such as sports leagues, TV show premieres, or holiday specials.

Seasonal subscriptions renew automatically when the next season begins, so you don’t need to acquire the same customers twice (improved subscriber retention and decreased customer churn). You can also provide more accurate revenue projections based on the expected auto-renewals and other customer data available in Cleeng ChurnIQ. 

Seasonal subscriptions come with a time-based pricing mechanism, where you can set up different prices: early-bird, low and high season, etc. These can help drive engagement and attract new customers during specific seasons or events. 

With Cleeng you can easily deal with the complexity of managing different billing cycles, renewals, and related legal requirements.

Setting Up a Seasonal Subscription

Seasonal subscription setup requires two steps. First, you need to define your seasonal schedule(s). Then you can create a seasonal subscription that’s linked to one of your schedules. Below, you can see how that works step by step. 

Step 1: Set up your seasonal schedule

A seasonal schedule is a group of seasons. See below for the exact setup steps.

1. Go to the ‘Offers & Coupons’ section in the main navigation.
2. Choose ‘Manage seasons’ (upper right side of the panel).
    
3. Click on ‘Add a new seasonal schedule’.
   
   
   
4. Provide the schedule name and add seasons with start and end dates and times.
   

• Season start and end dates don’t need to be the same as the real season (e.g. sports season). Treat these dates as business season, as you might want to sell access to the recordings from an already finished season for example.
• Season end date is a boundary (business) date from which you start selling the next season. Before this date, the existing season is still sold.  
• Next season's start date is the renewal date. 
• An upcoming season can't start in less than 31 days. The renewal notification emails are sent to the users 30 days before the nearest season start date (the renewal date), because of a legal requirement in some regions. 
• If a user purchases an offer between the seasons (after the end date of one season and before the start date of the next season), they will be charged at purchase, and the renewal date will be pushed towards the 2nd upcoming season (so that they are not charged twice for the upcoming season). 
• Seasons in one seasonal schedule can’t overlap. 
• Seasons must be added in chronological order. You won’t be able to create a season with a start date earlier than the end date of an existing season. 
• You can edit current and upcoming seasons. Past seasons and past dates can’t be edited or removed.

5. Set up more seasons by clicking on ‘+ Add another’.
   
   • Recommended: Define at least 2 seasons in advance, as the next season’s start date is the renewal date.
     
     
6. Once your seasonal schedule is ready, click ‘Save’. 

You can see an overview of a seasonal schedule in the diagram below:

You can define multiple seasonal schedules, for example, ‘Football League Schedule’, ‘Female Football League Schedule’, ‘U21 Football League Schedule’ etc. And link relevant offers to each schedule. 

It’s worth noting that schedules are independent entities that are just linked to offers (but they are not part of an offer). Multiple seasonal subscription offers can be linked to one seasonal schedule. See how it works in the next step. 

Step 2: Set up your seasonal subscription offer 

1. Go to the ‘Offers & Coupons’ section in the main navigation.
2. Choose ‘Create offer’ (upper right side of the panel) 
3. Steps 1 and 2 are the same as for all kinds of subscription offers at Cleeng.
4. In step 3 (pricing), choose ‘Seasonal’ as the billing period.
   Important: Make sure you have Dunning Action Settings configured for the seasonal billing period and each payment method. Dunning Action Settings must be set up for the recurring billing to function. 
   • If you integrated with Cleeng prior to August 2023 and you're adding the first seasonal subscription offer, you need to configure the Dunning Action Setting for the seasonal billing cycle for each payment method you offer. 
   • Check with Broadacter Support if you are not 100% sure of your settings.
     
     
5. Set the default offer price. It’s applied when there is no promotional price set up (see the next steps) and it’s always the renewal price for that offer. 
   
   
   
6. Provide the free trial settings and geo restrictions if you wish.
7. Choose the season schedule you created in step 1 of the tutorial.
   
   
   
8. Now you can select different seasons from that schedule and in the next step you will define promotional prices for them. ‘Season timeline’ below shows the time frames of the selected season.
   
   
   
9. Define promotional prices:

• Promotional prices enable you to apply time-based pricing models. They can be lower or higher than the default price.
• Keep in mind that you have already defined the default price for that offer. The default price will be applied to all recurring payments (subscription renewals when the new season starts). 
• Frequently, broadcasters want to reward loyal users by keeping the recurring price more attractive than other prices during the season. In that case, the default price is equal to the early-bird price, but once the season launches and the demand is higher, a higher price should be defined. 
• You can define as many promotional prices as you wish.
• Promotional prices will be applied to that offer only. So if you create another seasonal subscription, these settings will be blank, even if you link both offers to the same seasonal schedule. 

10. In the last step, you can add offer localizations.
11. Click ‘Finish setup’ and see the summary of the offer you’ve just created.

Subscription Upgrades and Downgrades for Seasonal Subscriptions 

For switches including a seasonal subscription (switching from/to a seasonal subscription), the following algorithms will be applied always:

• Upgrades: Immediate and charge with refund
• Downgrades: Deferred

Please note that the above algorithms will override your switch algorithms settings for switches from/to a seasonal subscription. 

As for upgrades, it's important to note that proration calculation in the context of seasonal subscriptions is modified. When calculating proration value, season start and end dates are taken into account, and the off-season period is ignored. This means that customers are not refunded when an upgrade happens off season.

Example:

A customer bought a Silver Package subscription to Football League on 15th July 2023 and paid 100 EUR. 2023 season lasted from 1 to 30 August. The next season (2024) will last from 1 to 30 August 2024. 

Assuming today is 1st September 2023 and the customer upgrades to Gold Package worth 500 EUR, s/he is charged the full price of 500 EUR and receives no refund. This is because the upgrade is made in-between seasons (in the off-season period).

If the same customer upgraded to Gold Package on 16th August 2023, s/he would pay 500 EUR for the Gold Package, but receive 50 EUR refund for the unused time during 2023 season (as the upgrade is halfway through the season).

Editing Seasonal Schedules and Seasons

To update a Seasonal Schedule/Season go to the ‘Offers & Coupons’ section in the main navigation and choose ‘Manage seasons’ (upper right side of the panel). Click on the ‘Edit schedule’ icon next to the schedule you want to change.

• An upcoming season can't start in less than 31 days. The renewal notification emails are sent to the users 30 days before the nearest season start date (the renewal date), because of a legal requirement in some regions. 
• You can edit future dates. Past seasons and past dates can’t be edited or removed.
• You can edit seasons, but it’s not possible to remove ongoing and past seasons. 
• When you edit a seasonal schedule, changing an upcoming season's start date triggers synchronization. Renewal dates of the existing subscriptions that are affected by the change (see the example below) are synchronized to the new next season start date. The synchronization process will not start for 24 hours after your changes, to give you time to correct any errors or unintended changes. At that point, editing will be disabled for 24 hours. By temporarily blocking the edit function during the renewal date update process, we are avoiding the potential for errors that can occur when numerous edits are made in a short timeframe.  

Example:

Let’s imagine we have a seasonal subscription offer: “European Football League” which is linked to the Seasonal Schedule “Champions” with 2 seasons defined originally (“Season 1” and “Season 2”). 

See the two cases below to see how renewal dates are affected depending on when the subscription was purchased, and when and what changes were made to the schedule.

CASE 1:

CASE 2: