Superdistribution of digital content - overview, opportunities and challenges

Superdistribution (SD) is a user-centric approach for publishing media contents like music, videos, or slide shows. Instead of following the traditional, provider-centric shop concept, SD is based on the idea that consumers can directly exchange content among each other, and hence it adopts the principles of viral marketing and multi-level networking as known from many other economic areas. The music industry, which is still suffering from illegal file sharing, has recently identified SD as an alternative marketing and distribution channel, and standardization authorities have extended their Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems accordingly or are planning to do so. This paper gives an overview of the origins of SD and its motivation and explains its different appearances from a technical point of view. Furthermore, it provides a market overview of SD-enabled content retail concepts and sketches related business scenarios.