STREAMOBILE: pay-per-view video streaming to mobile devices over the Internet

Abstract

As new mobile communication technologies are becoming broadly available, there is urgent pressure to populate them with services that provide returns for the huge investments made by telecommunications operators. Services around video transmission are expected to play a key role: news broadcasting, videoconferencing, movie channels, on-line gambling, etc. The goal of the STREAMOBILE project is to demonstrate an Internet pay-per-view distribution system toward GPRS and UMTS mobile devices. Copyright-protected contents are streamed to the customer and a micropayment scheme is used so that contents are not paid for in advance, but as they are being received by the customer. This paper presents an evolving prototype., whose client software has been designed in such a way that it can be easily migrated to 3G mobile devices.