This article introduces entitlements and explains how they relate to subscriptions and assets.
Included in this article:
Within Presentation Manager, the term rules is used to group together three related features: deals, offers, and plans. Entitlements work alongside these rules, but in the background, so you won't see them in the app. They exist only as APIs.
Note: Deals and offers are usually set up by the back-end team on a per-project basis and are automatically applied to assets during ingestion.
What are entitlements?
Entitlements are snapshots of an offer or plan details that are taken at the time of purchase. These details are saved to the user's account and are used to determine whether the user can play a particular asset.
There are two key types of entitlements: subscription entitlements and offer (or asset) entitlements.
The diagram below illustrates how rules, assets, users, and user groups interlink. Our focus here is on users.
Subscription entitlements
To subscribe to your services, a user must purchase a plan. Plans confer certain benefits on the user and have specific terms and conditions. The act of purchasing a plan generates what we call a subscription entitlement - a snapshot of information containing details of the plan, saved to the user's account.
Note: It's important to understand that the plan itself does not grant users access to assets.
When you set up a plan, you can only associate it with one user group. When a user purchases a plan subscription, they're automatically added to the subscription user group that plan is linked to. Their subscription entitlement is therefore also linked to that subscription user group.
Like plans, subscription offers, which grant access to assets, are mapped to a single subscription user group.
Subscription offers require an active subscription entitlement for playback, meaning users must be registered to a plan. Subscription offers are used to target specific audiences who are entitled to certain assets under their subscription plan.
When the user wants to play a particular asset in their app, the app needs to identify whether they have access to it. To do this, it must consider their subscription entitlement and compare it with the asset's subscription offer, to see if there is a user group match. If there is, then the user has an entitlement, and the Watch button will be presented in their app, allowing them to play the asset.
For users without the required entitlement, assets under a subscription offer will display a Subscribe button.
We've created a handy infographic to illustrate how rules work to create a user's entitlement to view content. For more information on this topic you should also take a look at our plans and subscriptions and user groups articles.
Offer entitlements
Users browsing content via your apps may choose to rent or purchase an asset via an offer. Once the user completes the transaction, an offer entitlement is added to their account.
The entitlement essentially acts as a copy of the original asset offer, preserving the conditions in place at the time the user rented or purchased the asset, in case the offer is removed. Those conditions include the asset validity (start and end date). When the offer that the asset belongs to expires, the user no longer has access to the asset under the offer conditions.
Here's an example:
An offer exists as a Black Friday promotion, and your user rents an asset under the promotion. The offer stipulates that the asset can be streamed and downloaded for 30 days from the date of purchase. The offer entitlement is saved to the user's account, meaning they can access the asset for the next 30 days. The following Monday, an operator removes the Black Friday promotional offer, so it no longer displays in the apps. Due to the offer entitlement, however, the asset is still available to the user and anyone who purchased it when the offer was active.
For more information, view the offers article.