Are incentive schemes needed for WebRTC based distributed streaming?: a crowdsourced study on the relation of user motivation and quality of experience

Video traffic is the main driver of Internet traffic volume. Thus, content providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are searching for ways to provide reliable video transmission at a low cost. Hybrid CDN/Peer-to-Peer (P2P) deployments like Akamai NetSession have been shown to combine the high reliability of a CDN backbone and the low cost of P2P networks. In the near future, the biggest barrier for user adoption will fall: the installation of a dedicated P2P client software will be replaced by website embedded browser-to-browser communication logic. However, this requires the explicit consent of users, and, since users need to share their upload capacity, their willingness to participate in such a system. In this work, the efficiency of incentive mechanisms trading a higher Quality of Experience (QoE) of video transmission for user's consent to utilize their upload capacity are investigated. This is the first study to investigate the question of incentives in distributed, adaptive streaming systems from a user perspective using a crowd working approach. The work presents results from 192 test subjects. We identify three classes of users and show how behavioral economics can be utilized to increase the impact of an incentive scheme.