Game theoretic pricing policy in online media delivery platforms

Abstract

Residential users get most of their preferred content (e.g., films, news) from their wireless access point, which is connected to content providers through one or several network providers. Nowadays, these access points have enough storage and wireless transmission capacities to distribute the content to neighboring access points if required and allowed by the user. Based on this concept, this paper considers a hybrid content distribution model in peer-to-peer content deliver networks. A user or peer in this network can get its content either directly from the content provider (CP), or from a neighboring user who has this content stored and is willing to share it. Two types of users are considered: premium users are the users getting always the content directly from the CP, and standard user are the users getting the content from other standard users, when possible, otherwise from the CP. Furthermore, standard user share their content to other users if required. This paper studies the pricing problem of the CP such that there are enough standard users to distribute the content (using less network resources and reducing significantly the delay) while maximizing the CP benefits.We address the problem from a game theoretic approach and evaluate when the Nash Equilibrium can be attained. The obtained case have been applied to a real life study using a BBC iPlayer dataset and an analysis on the CP benefits dependence on different parameters. Finally we extend this pricing model when considering also the reduction of load on its content custodian (server) and discuss how the pricing policy is affected.