One aspect of VoD systems that has been largely neglected by the research community is pricing of VoD services. In this paper we briefly investigate several factors that can affect the price of a video stream delivered to the user, and also analyze some economic tradeoffs that exist in that context. We develop models for pricing three different types of VoD service. We also demonstrate how profits can be maximized in such a scenario. 5 concludes the paper and gives some directions of future work.
Users arrive into the system with an average rate of per unit time.
For simplicity, suppose that the VoD system is not aggregation based, i.e., each channel supports only one user, because the service is fully interactive. Suppose that the movie is time units long, and that the users remain in the system for some more video time , on average, due to pauses and rewinds. For stability of the queue, i.e., for bounded waiting times, the condition must hold, hence should be chosen properly. Now suppose each user is charged a price for viewing a movie. However, the exact function can only be known from marketing experiments such as user polls and surveys.