There are several reasons why content in apps might not be available anymore:
1. The most common reason is that viewers used up all your included Video Minutes (Bandwidth). If you end up falling below 0 with your Video Minutes we won't just charge you an expensive overage but rather make streams and on demand videos unavailable in your embedded players and media centers. This is to your own protection, as it avoids unwanted surprises of overage costs. Due to this protective policy we highly recommend to either choose a service subscription with plenty of Video Minutes (Bandwidth) included, or alternatively to credit your account with a "buffer" of at least 100k Video Minutes to have total peace of mind.
2. Payment wasn't received within our three weeks payment period. Lightcast’s automated accounting system will retry the credit card on file several times within a 21-day window, notifying about the bounced payments via email and about the automated deactivation dates. This is to all parties protection, as the system tries to reduce the amount of overdraft of bandwidth, otherwise publishers might blame us that we allow them to overdraw so far that they have to buy all those minutes to get back up again. So by starting to deactivate content, the system helps reduce that.
As with any other OVP & CDN or even consumer telecommunication services with recurring payments, the accounting system behind is fully automated and follows similar standards of automated payment processing and auto-deactivation of accounts. It is just important that the vendor communicates this in its Terms of Service, in its Support Center and FAQ articles and via automated email alerts to notify its customers about payment failures and auto-deactivation dates. Lightcast is following all of these compliances and provides a very high level of service in this regard, far above standards in this industry.
Just like with most other web-based services, our clients manage their payment preferences themselves within their Lightcast Media Cloud account (under "Invoices"). It is possible to add a new credit card at any time, but it is each client’s responsibility to always keep an active and sufficiently funded credit card or debit card available on file in their self-managed accounts.
Tip: To permanently avoid any down-times at all, we provide publishers with several different preference settings to remove any risk for auto-deactivation (such as the recommended Overdraft Protection Setting, or the purchase of a Bandwidth Buffer). And in addition the system sends numerous payment failure emails out automatically over the course of several weeks to alert our clients that a payment failed or a credit card expires soon.
It takes a long time (almost a month) until the system automatically begins to deactivate the availability of contents in Apps, but at some point, for security reasons, the system has to. This is to all parties protection, as the system tries to reduce the amount of overdraft of bandwidth. Otherwise publishers might blame us that we allow them to overdraw so far that they have to buy all those minutes to get back up again. So the by starting to deactivate contents, the system helps reduce that. To permanently avoid any downtimes at all, we provide publishers with several different preference settings to remove any risk for auto-deactivation (such as the recommended Overdraft Protection Setting, or the purchase of a Bandwidth Buffer). And in addition the system sends numerous payment failure emails out automatically over the course of several weeks. Just to explain why it is automated like this. We are just trying to build the best setup for our customers. Hope that is understandable.