Mike Ingle writes:

Are you thinking of physical videotape or electronic distribution?

Electronic distribution. "Anonymous video on demand" is a bit misleading, because I'm not so much interested in preventing the video provider from knowing my identity, just from correlating my identity with my video selections.

For electronic distribution, suppose you have a fiber-optic cable with n channels, where n is a large number.

My feeling is that this architecture is too inflexible. Here's the sort of thing I have in mind: Customer browses the video supplier's catalog and notes the catalog number of the video it wants Customer randomly chooses 99 other catalog numbers to generate a pool of 100 catalog numbers. The Customer and the Video Provider engage in a protocol so that the Customer ends up receiving 100 compressed and encrypted videos, only one of which the Customer can successfully decrypt (and uncompress). The Video Provider never learns which of the 100 videos the Customer successfully decrypts, but is sure that the Customer can decrypt only one of them. I don't know what the protocol would be, but it sounds like an ANDOS-like protocol. By the way, I think that if the "rental" fee is low enough, the Video Provider wont have to worry about cheaters. If it costs you more money (or time) to cheat the Video Provider than it does to simply pay the fee, then most people will pay the fee. I'm thinking the fee would be as small as 25 cents/video, for example. Jim_Miller@suite.com