Toll-Free Data Service Incentivized Sharing Mechanism
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Solution Overview
Problem
Mobile subscribers with data usage limits face challenges in managing their data consumption, leading to overages and limitations in accessing content, as they need to curtail activities when approaching their monthly data limits, which affects both consumers and content providers.
Innovation Solution
The Toll-Free Data (TFD) service allows content providers to sponsor data access for consumers, enabling them to access content without charging it to their personal accounts, with incentives for sharing TFD content and promoting time-shifting data services to reduce peak usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If mobile subscribers curtail data usage activities when approaching monthly data limits, then data overage costs are avoided, but content accessibility and user engagement are reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a content provider-sponsored data program as an intermediary mechanism. Content providers sponsor data allowances that allow users to access their content without consuming the user's personal data plan, thus avoiding overage costs while maintaining accessibility. The sponsor acts as a mediator between the user's data constraints and the content delivery needs.
2Ease of operation
If content providers sponsor data access for consumers, then content accessibility is improved, but data consumption management complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements self-service mechanisms where users automatically receive sponsored data allowances through their account associations with content providers. The network infrastructure automatically tracks and manages the sponsored data allocations, freeing users from manual data management while content providers can easily sponsor content through platform integration.
3Productivity
If users share TFD content links on social networks, then content visibility and provider benefits increase, but system tracking and billing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses unique tracking links that are copied and shared by users on social networks. Each shared link contains encoded information about the user and content, allowing automatic tracking of referrals and usage. This copying mechanism enables viral distribution while the underlying system automatically attributes and bills based on the encoded link information without requiring complex manual tracking.
Data Source
AI summary
A network device provides, to a user device, an application for managing viewing and sharing of content available via an Internet service provider, and assigns a unique code for a user of the user device. The network device provides a catalog of available content items that includes toll-free data (TFD) content items with a different TFD uniform resource locator (URL) for each TFD content item in the catalog of available content items. The network device receives a user's selection, from the catalog, of a TFD content item to share, and generates a sharing URL based on a TFD URL for the selected TFD content item and the unique sharing code. The network device provides the sharing URL to the user device for sharing with other users.