Film festival streaming platform with real screening windows

Geo-fencing has a platform-wide block or allow list and a per-title list. A festival sets the platform default to its own territory and then narrows or widens each film according to its agreement: a world premiere might be limited to the festival’s country, a film with a regional deal to three. The viewer’s country is read from the request IP through a geolocation lookup at playback and a blocked viewer sees a refusal instead of a stream.

Every film has a scheduled publish time. You prepare its page in the weeks before, artwork, synopsis, director’s note, the trailer as free preview minutes, and set the publish time to the screening slot. At that moment the film appears on the website and in the apps and becomes purchasable. A festival with a daily schedule sets a publish time per film and the program unfolds on its own, which matters while the team runs the venue.

A single ticket is a pay-per-view purchase, and the pay-per-view rule carries a rental window with an expiry, an unseen-expiry and a view count. Set the expiry so that access ends at the close of the screening window, the unseen-expiry so a ticket bought on opening night cannot be used after the festival, and a small view count. After the window the player refuses, and once the festival ends you unpublish the film so nothing lingers.

A single ticket is the pay-per-view rule with a price, and prices can differ by video quality if you want a premium ticket. The festival pass is a subscription plan that includes the program; a pass holder plays any included film without a separate purchase. Both rules can sit on the same film, so a visitor without a pass buys a ticket while a pass holder walks in. The purchase goes through your own gateway on the website.

A shorts block is a series with one episode per short, so it screens as a single program with one ticket and one window while each short keeps its own credits, subtitles and country list if a short has a different deal. Sections of the festival, competition, documentary, retrospective, are categories that shape the home page. Subtitles per film are uploaded as WebVTT tracks in the languages you need for an international program.

Live streams are scheduled events with live chat, optional pay-per-view and free preview minutes, and can be restreamed to YouTube channels as the plan allows. A festival schedules a Q&A after each premiere, includes it in the pass, and lets the audience ask questions in chat. There are no chat moderation tools in the platform code, so a moderator reads and answers rather than filters; keep that in mind when you decide which sessions get a public chat.

Films are protected by per-title access rules, signed playback URLs with a time-to-live, geo-fencing and a visible logo watermark on every plan. Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady encryption is not in the platform code; DRM is arranged through the delivery layer on request as part of an enterprise plan. If a sales agent requires encryption for a premiere, raise that scoping before you confirm the film, not the week of the festival.

The player overlays your festival logo with a position, opacity and link, the same for every viewer. It makes a screen recording obviously yours, which helps a takedown, but it does not identify which ticket holder recorded it. Flicknexs does not describe it as a forensic mark, and you should not promise per-viewer marking to a filmmaker unless you have scoped it separately through the delivery layer.

The viewer’s country comes from the request IP. A viewer on a VPN exiting inside an allowed country passes the check. Rules are per platform and per title, not per device app. Most sales agents accept IP-based enforcement as commercially reasonable; put that wording in your filmmaker agreement so everyone signs the same understanding rather than discovering it during the festival.

A screening window is a publish time and a rental expiry, not a ticketed showtime with a fixed capacity. There is no cap on the number of tickets a film can sell and no synchronized start where everyone watches together. If a filmmaker requires a capped audience, enforce the cap by hand: unpublish the film or remove the pay-per-view rule when your count is reached, using the revenue and content reports as your counter.

Films stream inside the window; there is no download for offline viewing. Live Q&A chat has no moderation tools in the platform code, so a human host reads the room. Neither is unusual for a festival, but both belong in your audience help page and your filmmaker agreement so nobody is surprised on opening night.