Private and fair pay-per-view scheme for Web-based video-on-demand systems

With the development of high speed computer networks, various Web-based services have become available. One Web-based service is video-on-demand (VOD). VOD allows subscribers to view any video whenever they want. Pay-per-view is an effective charge scheme for a VOD service. Pay-per-view allows subscribers to pay for what they have viewed. Pay-per-view schemes have been proposed by J. Zhou and K. Lam (see Proc. Second Int. Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography, Lect. Notes in Comp. Sci., vol.1560, p.315-26, 1999) and by N. Lee (see IEEE Trans. Consumer Electron., vol.46, no.4, p.980-5, 2000). Those schemes can give a basic pay-per-view charging capability but lack practicality because they do not consider client buffering and VCR functions. Videos cannot play smoothly without client buffering. Subscribers consider VCR functions very convenient. We propose a pay-per-view scheme that allows client buffering and supports VCR functions. The proposed scheme also supports protection of the program from non-subscribers and protection of the privacy of subscribers.