A methodology for analysing substitution effects between QoS and best effort based services

Substitution effects play an important role for the success of dynamically evolving services in the Internet. The impact of substitution concerns particularly best effort and QoS services. Therefore substitution effects strongly influence QoS business models and the planning of QoS service distribution infrastructures. In this article, we present a methodology, the Lotka-Volterra (LVC) model, which allows the analysis and quantification of such substitution effects. We show the application of the LVC model to the case of IP based TV and compare the diffusion of two German IP based TV services: Zattoo and T-Entertain. The results imply the absence of substitution effects between IP TV and Internet TV services.