Enabling Secure and Flexible Streaming Media With Blockchain Incentive

As a typical application of mobile crowdsourcing, streaming media has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. However, traditional streaming media platforms, such as Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu, may suffer some problems like inflexible billing modes, lacking sustainability in the incentive mechanisms, and management censorship. These problems may lead to a decrease in user participation rate, which will directly affect the interests of streaming media platforms. To address these issues, we propose a secure, efficient, and flexible streaming media platform framework based on blockchain and well-designed smart contracts. In particular, we design a new billing model based on a pay-as-you-go strategy and a new incentive mechanism with a probabilistic payment technique. To improve the fairness of our incentive model, we introduce a secondary fee refund protocol where a user’s second consecutive payment could be refunded, which in turn can attract more users to participate in the platform. Since blockchain has the natural properties of decentralization and transparency, the proposed framework is resistant to censorship and enables the transactions to be publicly auditable. Based on the proposed framework, we have implemented two streaming media platform schemes. Scheme I relies primarily on smart contracts to implement the framework’s functionality, while Scheme II moves the main flow of the framework to off-chain channels. As the execution of smart contracts requires transaction fees, Scheme I is more expensive but can provide much more security and accountability as well. Scheme II can execute the transaction process much faster and with only a small transaction fee. Finally, we deployed these two schemes on Ropsten and conduct a series of experiments. The results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed schemes.