A payment scheme for broadcast multimedia streams

Streaming multimedia data on the Internet is developing as a mainstream technology, which attracts many users by providing a new and convenient form of access to online multimedia information. While its strong business potential is obvious, many problems related to charging, copyright protection, and privacy can delay or even hinder its extensive deployment. In this paper we are concerned with the charging problem, and propose an electronic payment scheme to use for purchasing broadcast multimedia streams. Our design respects the pay-per-use principle, makes cheating uninteresting for both the user and the service provider, resists forgery and over-spending, protects sensitive payment information and user privacy, and allows the identification of misbehaving users.