The Economics of Multimedia

The Economics of MultimediaDr. Darko Kirovski
Microsoft ResearchAbstract:
Researchers often forget that "Content is King," that the technical world of multimedia is built around popular multimedia content, not the other way around. With an emphasis on economics, I will overview a recently proposed economic ecosystem for building an incentive-based off-line market for digital media. In the system, anyone can buy or sell digital media anywhere, anytime. Transactions are executed via a tamper-resistant media player equipped with a short-distance wireless, e.g. iPod + WiPAN. Most importantly, transaction revenues are split so that one part goes to the rightful copyright holder and the remainder to the seller as an incentive. The proposed viral marketing network has an objective to: 1) improve the profits of copyright owners by reduction in operation costs and improved media availability, and 2) satisfy a sophisticated set of usability and economic requirements end-users may have. The new system creates two important research directions: design of a secure, atomic transaction protocol and modeling of the proposed ecosystem to explore the effect of key pricing, delivery, networking, and marketing strategies. In a prelude to the technical part of his talk, I will first overview several ongoing projects at Microsoft Research related to multimedia.Short Bio of Speaker:
Darko Kirovski received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. Since April 2000, he has been a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests span over several systems research areas: multimedia processing and economics, counterfeit deterrents, security, biometrics, reliable computing, and embedded system design. He has received the 1999 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2000 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference Graduate Scholarship, the 2001 ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation, the Best Paper Award at ACM Multimedia 2002, and co-authored a Best Student Paper at MMSP 2006 with Shan He. Darko has authored over 90 journal and conference papers and filed over 30 patents.Host C.-C. Jay Kuo, x04658

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