An Event-Based Platform-Independent Verification Method for OTT Content Usage History

Abstract

In OTT (Over-The-Top) service environments, reliable recording and verification of content usage history are becoming increasingly important for copyright protection, royalty settlement, and dispute resolution. However, conventional platform-specific log management methods have limitations in interoperability, integrity assurance, and external verifiability. In addition, simple indicators such as the number of views or total playback time are insufficient to accurately reflect actual OTT viewing behavior, which often includes nonlinear interactions such as pause, seek, replay, and early stop. This paper proposes a platform-independent event-based verification method for OTT content usage history. The proposed method defines usage history metadata consisting of content information, session information, playback event information, and usage result information, and derives valid usage intervals from playback events such as play, pause, seek, replay, and stop. In addition, hash-based verification information and linked recording structures are applied to the generated usage history to enhance integrity and traceability. To examine the applicability of the proposed method, processing latency in the usage history aggregation stage was measured according to changes in the number of sessions and platforms. The experimental results show that the processing time increased in a stable manner as the session scale increased, indicating that the proposed method can be applied to large-scale OTT usage environments. This study is meaningful in that it presents a platform-independent and verifiable method for organizing OTT content usage history, and it can be further extended through future performance evaluation of blockchain recording and verification processes in diverse service environments.