A Scalable Delivery Framework and a Pricing Model for Streaming Media with Advertisements∗

This paper presents a delivery framework for streaming media with advertisements and an associated pricing model. The delivery model combines the benefits of periodic broadcasting and stream merging. The advertisements’ revenues are used to subsidize the price of the media content. The pricing is determined based on the total ads’ viewing time. Moreover, this paper presents an efficient ad allocation scheme and three modified scheduling policies that are well suited to the proposed delivery framework. Furthermore, we study the effectiveness of the delivery framework and various scheduling polices through extensive simulation in terms of numerous metrics, including customer defection probability, average number of ads viewed per client, price, channel utilization, arrival rate, profit, and revenue.