he ubiquity of broadband Internet is at the origin of the emergence of Over-The-Top (OTT) subscription services such as Netflix or Hulu. The specificity of OTTs is to provide broadband video and audio deliv- ery to Internet users without a particular dedicated involve- ment of their Internet Service Provider (ISP). To offer high quality multimedia content distribution, OTTs commonly rely on distribution infrastructures with multiple points of pres- ence connected at main Internet exchange points. This need for advanced distribution infrastructures derives from the cur- rent technical limitations of TCP/IP that bind communications to the location of the server by using IP addresses. Moreover, the multimedia nature of OTT services requires low latency, jitter, and loss rate. Hence, OTT servers should not be in topologically and performance constrained locations, as it usu- ally happens in P2P networks, and should limit the number of relay hops as much as possible. OTTs could simplify their dis- tribution infrastructure by following an Information-Centric Networking (ICN) [1] approach. ICN relies on the “routing by name” paradigm and leverages in-network caching where intermediate network nodes can cache any piece of data pass- ing through them. This caching capability of ICN networks ensures that popular content is cached on routers close to the clients [2]. As a matter of fact, ICN can significantly increase content distribution efficiency with respect to legacy technology [1,2]. When capital expenditures are not insurmountable obstacles to deploy ICN-capable network elements, the advantage for ISPs to deploy ICN inside their networks is immediate as ICN inherently helps in reducing overall link usage. The advantage is less straightforward for OTTs as they are very sensitive to network conditions of networks they do not control. A reason- able way for OTTs to profit from ICN is to construct an ICN overlay that interconnects OTT servers and clients. The ratio- nal behind using overlays is that they can be incrementally deployed in the Internet and hence do not require network nodes from the underlay (i.e. ISP’s equipment) to explicitly participate in the ICN network. In the ICN overlay, every node implements the same ICN protocol, and OTT clients caching contents can deliver them to other clients on behalf of the OTT provider. The routing system determines from which node customers retrieve the content (either a caching node or directly from a server). Figure 1 synthetizes the simplest interaction between the stakeholders (OTT, caching customer nodes, non-caching cus- tomer nodes) for the baseline case of three ICN nodes beyond which two are hosted by OTT consumers (nodes II and I in the figure) and one is hosted by an OTT provider server (node OTT in the figure). The routing system allows a cus- tomer node to retrieve the content either directly from the OTT server node or from the other customer node. In the fig- ure, arrows indicate the direction of requests to obtain con- tent and the label specifies the strategy adopted by the node performing the request. Customer I (resp. II) has the choice between four strategies: it can retrieve the content from the OTT server, caching it for customer II (resp. I) (label = OTT c ); it can retrieve it from the OTT server, not caching it (label = OTT); it can retrieve it from the other customer, caching it (label = II c (resp. I c )); or it can retrieve it from the other customer, not caching it (label = II (resp. I)). For the sake of simplification we do not show impossible strategy combinations. In our study, we adopt the standpoint of the OTT provider willing to incent the usage of the ICN overlay among its cus- tomers, under the assumption that using the ICN overlay is always profitable for the OTT provider: when customers retrieve content from the OTT server it is equivalent to not using the overlay; and the OTT infrastructure load is reduced when customers retrieve content from other customers. In our study, we also assume that customers are independent and selfish, i.e. not prone to binding cooperation in ICN provisioning. In this context we show that with the right incentives the OTT provider can make their customers coor- T 20 IEEE Network • May/June 2014 With the explosion of broadband Over-The-Top (OTT) services, the Internet is autonomously migrating toward overlay and incrementally deployable content dis- tribution infrastructures. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) technologies are the natural candidates to efficiently distribute popular content to users. However, the strategic incentives in exploiting ICN, for both users and ISPs, are much less under- stood to date. In this article we highlight strategic incentives for ICN overlay adop- tion in OTT services, that is, we discus how OTTs shall shape their prices to motivate ICN overlay usages. On the Incentives and Incremental Deployments of ICN Technologies for OTT Services Damien Saucez, Stefano Secci, and Chadi Barakat T 0890-8044/14/$25.00 © 2014 IEEE Damien Saucez and Chadi Barakat are with INRIA Sophia Antipolis. Stefano Secci is with UPMC.