A profitable multicast business model

Multicast is an efficient paradigm for transmitting data from a sender to a group of receivers. Multicast incurs lower network bandwidth and end–system costs than broadcast to all receivers or multiple unicasts to individual receivers. One of the main impediments in wide scale deployment of multicast is lack of a good business model. Any technology needs a good business model to succeed. Each of the parties involved must see some advantage in using the technology. In this paper we present a simple business model for multicast in the Internet that uses the inherent benefits of multicast to make it profitable to all the parties, including the multicast sender, multicast receivers and the network providers, that are involved. Our model is based on the following principle. Multicast receivers should not pay any extra charge for receiving multicast over unicast, the sender pays for the bandwidth used in multicast to the Internet service providers and might charge the receivers for the content. We describe our model and demonstrate that its use proves profitable to the sender, receivers and the Internet service providers. We also discuss issues related to this model’s implementation.