Economics of a Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Infrastrcuture for Content Distribution

Distributing digital media contents to a large number of users in a cost-effective manner is a challenging task for the content provider. Traditionally, the content provider either deploys a set of high capacity servers or contracts a content delivery network (CDN) to transport contents to users. The first approach requires a significant investment to set up and administer the servers. While in the second approach the CDN charges the provider for every megabyte served. For large files such as movies, both approaches burden the budget of the content provider. For instance, the limited deployability of video on demand services may be attributed, in part, to the cost factor. Motivated by the success of the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm in the last few years and by the immense number of the often underutilized end systems connected to the Internet, we propose a collaborative P2P infrastructure for cost-effective content distribution. The objectives of this position paper are: (1) To highlight the economic potential of a content distribution system built on top of a P2P infrastructure, and (2) To identify the key research problems that need to be addressed in order to realize this economic potential.