MICROCAST: Smart Card Based (Micro)Pay-per-View for Multicast Services

With the increased availability of broadband fixed and mobile communications, multicast content delivery can be expected to become a very important market. Especially for wireless multicast delivery, it is important that payment collection be fine-grain: the customer should pay only for the content that she actually consumes. This can be achieved by using pay-per-view based on micropayments. This paper proposes the first method for enabling pay-as-you-watch services in a multicast content delivery environment. On the customer's side, micropayment generation is implemented in a smart card which can be plugged into the customer's receiving device (computer, digital video receiver, PDA, mobile phone, etc.). Micropayment collection and verification are distributed among multicast routers, which avoids bottlenecks inherent to many-to-one payment transmission.