An incentive charging scheme for video-on-demand

Video-on-demand (VOD) systems can provide either an individual service or batch service. For individual service, a user can receive video immediately after making a request and he/she can perform interactive operations (such as pause, jump, fast forward and rewind), and the system uses one video stream to serve one user. For batch service, a user has to wait after making a request and cannot perform interactive operations, but the system can use one video stream to serve a batch of users. Therefore, individual service has a better quality while batch service requires less resources to serve each user. In this paper, we consider a VOD system providing both services and propose an incentive charging scheme to optimize the coexistence of both services. This scheme imposes a lower service charge on batch service in order to attract users to choose this service. Consequently, the service provider can get more revenue by serving more concurrent users via batch service and users can choose their preferred services. We analyze the incentive charging scheme and maximize the mean revenue subject to a given availability specification. The numerical results show that the incentive charging scheme is particularly effective in peak hours when the demand for the VOD service is large.