Psychological backgrounds for inducing cooperation in peer-to-peer television

Television and the Internet have proven to be a popular combination for both broadcasters and viewers. Because of this popularity they are increasingly facing the consequences of central bottlenecks, which could be overcome by taking a different approach: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology. P2P systems can only be successful with as much cooperation among as many users as possible. We explain how this cooperation is hard to enforce, and how inducing it might be more successful. This paper lists relevant psychological backgrounds that can be used to induce this cooperation, along with possible applications for our system called Peer-to-Peer Television (P2P-TV).