Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts- P12

Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts- P12: The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player and online games,technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created a new form of entertainmentand art, which attracts and absorbs their participants. The fantastic successof this new field has influenced the development of the new digital entertainmentindustry and related products and services, which has impacted every aspect of ourlives.
Nội dung trích xuất từ tài liệu:
Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts- P12322 M. Furini and M. Montangerotwo other policies, the revenue of a customer depends on the number of customersthat receive the song directly and indirectly from him/her. Thus, the way in which thesong spreads among customers greatly influences their revenue; e.g., a customermight have a big income with little effort if the customers to whom the song isdelivered put a lot of effort in reselling the song; customers might get an unexpectedreward also after a long period of time from the moment he/she sold the song. Theproportional reward policy produces better results than the equal distribution, as acustomer needs a smaller number of customers in its subtree, even if to get a fullrefund of CI , the minimum number of customers is reasonable in both cases. Moreover, although we analyzed the worst-case scenario, this is unlikely to hap-pen in reality, especially if we think that music is distributed according to socialrelationships. Hence, with a multi-channel distribution strategy, in average, even asmaller number of customers has to be reached and it is likely that many customers(the higher they are in the tree, the better) might have a revenue grater than CI . From the store point of view, the choice of the policy depends on which, amongthe customers, the store wants to favor: the selfish policy favors the ones that buyfrom the store; the equal favors the customers that join the music distribution earlier;the proportional favors the customers that actually distribute the song.Related WorkContent distribution in a mobile environment is a subject investigated in recent liter-ature: some are experiencing the development of ad-hoc P2P networks in a mobileenvironment [13, 14], others are proposing to disseminate contents in Wi-Fi basedad-hoc networks through epidemic algorithms [18, 29]. The multi-channel distribution outlined in this paper does not require a real P2Pnetwork, as the song delivery simply requires the cooperation of two customers,making the operation more similar to what happens when a friend text-messages orsends an MMS to another friend. In this case, the message content is the song andthe network used is other than the cellphone network. Many of the approaches present in literature are designed to stimulate userscooperation in a P2P networks [2, 3, 25, 28]; for example, peers are asked to routequeries or are limited in the use of bandwidth according to the amount of bandwidththey provided to the system. For scalability reasons, most of these mechanisms aredistributed, requiring only local information available at each peer. This might leadto malicious modification of peer local information by the peer itself, and hencetamper resistant software should be employed at the user side. Our mechanism issimple to implement because it comes with a centralized control mechanism at nocost: the store can always keep track of the spreading of the song and is alwaysable to correctly assign revenues. Whenever a user wants to play a song he/she justbought, he/she needs to buy the license from the store. At this stage, the store caneasily record who sold and who bought the song, updating the information aboutsong spreading.14 Incentive Mechanisms for Mobile Music Distribution 323 We are not aware of any distribution strategy that couples cellphone networks andfree-of-charge technologies to distribute contents, and that makes use of incentivemechanisms to stimulate the customer cooperation in content distribution.ConclusionsIn this paper we analyzed the characteristics of the current mobile music scenario,investigating the communication infrastructure, the pricing strategy and the copy-right protection scheme currently used. The analysis highlighted that a replicationof the strategy used to distribute contents in the Internet-based music market is notworth applying in the mobile scenario, as it presents critical problems (excessivedownload time and high cost). To mitigate such problems, we show that a multi-channel distribution strategycan be successful. In such a strategy, customers can re-distribute the song acquiredby using the free-of-charge communication technologies provided in cellphones. Weshowed that by using a smart protection scheme, music sharing could avoid piracy.We also present an incentive mechanism, coupled with three different reward poli-cies, which stimulates customers cooperation by providing a financial compensationto those customers who help distributing music files. The evaluation of the multi-channel distribution strategy equipped with the pro-posed incentive mechanism showed that considerable benefits may be received byall the entities involved in the mobile music distribution, from music stores to cus-tomers, to cellphone network providers.References1. K. C. Almeroth and A. Garyfalos. Coupons: Wide scale information distribution for wireless ad hoc networks. In Proc. of IEEE Globecom, December 2004.2. K. G. Anagnostakis and M. B. Greenwald, Exchange-based incentive mechanisms for peer-to- peer file sharing. In International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 2004.3. K. G. Anagnostakis, M. B. G. Yang, T. Condie, S. Kamvar, and H. Garcia-Molina, Non- cooperation in competitive p2p networks. In International Conference on Distributed Com- puting Systems, 2004.4. P. Antoniadis, C. Courcoubetis and B. Strulo, Incentives for content availability in memory- less peer-to- peer file sharing systems. SIGecom Exch., Vol.5, No. 4, pp. 11–20, 2005, ACM press.5. K. Biddle, P. England, M. Peinado, and B. Willman. The darknet and the future of content distribution. In Proc. of the ACM Workshop on DRM, 2002.6. B. Brown, A. J. Sellen, and E. Geelhoed. Music sharing as a co ...