How much you watch, how much you pay
Yongdong Wu, HweeHwa Pang, Robert Huijie Deng · 2005
This paper presents a pay-video scheme that manages video stream, key stream and payment stream efficiently. In our scheme, the owner segments a video into fragments and encrypts them with independent keys. The keys are generated with a novel concept called as hash interval, where each hash interval discloses a range of numbers without disclosing any information on numbers outside of the range. The video fragments are then broadcast on one or more channels. A buyer can purchase the keys to decrypt any fragments and, within each fragment, any desired quality level. The accompanying payment protocol is integrated with the key management protocol seamlessly and hence the computation cost is very low.