A Methodology to Estimate the Unit Price of User Contribution in P2P Streaming System - A Case Study

Peer-to-Peer content delivery technology recently begins to be used not only for file sharing applications such as eDonkey but also for every kind of content services. KBS, a broadcasting company in Korea, is aggressively driving to apply Peer-to-Peer technology to KBS's commercial internet video service but we found that there are two big huddles. First, end users may refuse to share their own resources for KBS's cost reduction using Peer-to-Peer content delivery technology. Second, it may cause that the number of free-riders increases and the efficiency of the overall system would fall. From commercial service provider's perspective, we have to avoid that end users have unfavorable impressions on the service and the usefulness of Peer-to-Peer technology decreases. In order to overcome these problems, we studied how to offer incentive to end users and how much incentive would be reasonable, and then applied the result to real service for verification.