Can internet video-on-demand be profitable?

Abstract

Video-on-demand in the Internet has become an immensely popular service in recent years. But due to its high bandwidth requirements and popularity, it is also a costly service to provide. We consider the design and potential benefits of peer-assisted video-on-demand, in which participating peers assist the server in delivering VoD content. The assistance is done in such a way that it provides the same user quality experience as pure client-server distribution. We focus on the single-video approach, whereby a peer only redistributes a video that it is currently watching. Using a nine-month trace from a client-server VoD deployment for MSN Video, we assess what the 95 percentile server bandwidth costs would have been if a peer-assisted employment had been instead used. We show that peer-assistance can dramatically reduce server bandwidth costs, particularly if peers prefetch content when there is spare upload capacity in the system. We consider the impact of peer-assisted VoD on the cross-traffic among ISPs. Although this traffic is significant, if care is taken to localize the P2P traffic within the ISPs, we can eliminate the ISP cross traffic while still achieving important reductions in server bandwidth. We also develop a simple analytical model which captures many of the critical features of peer-assisted VoD, including its operational modes.

The Challenge of Retaining Customers Acquired with Free Trials

“…Because we observe consumer-specific direct-marketing efforts before and after acquisition, we can readily compute the acquisition and retention direct-marketing costs for each customer by multiplying 1 To obtain an estimate of content costs for streamed VODs, we divide Netflix's cost of revenue in 2013 ($2.6bn) by the number of hours of watched content in that year (12bn), resulting in content costs of $.22 per streamed hour (Netflix 2014). At an average length of 90 minutes per VOD (Huang, Li, and Ross 2007), content costs amount to $.33 per VOD (approximately €.25).…”

P2P Video-on-Demand: Steady State and Scalability

“…In a downloadconstrained steady state, the service provider could drop some of its permanent seeds without repercussions. In the case of a YouTube-like VoD service provider, the required upload bandwidth per video is a significant portion of costs [10]. Thus even a slight reduction in needed upload bandwidth can be significant.…”

Performance bounds for peer-assisted live streaming

“…The application scenarios include IPTV [11,13,1,27,21], video-on-demand [15,16,28,24], and video conferencing [5]. Our effort focuses on the analysis of large-scale IPTV systems.…”