HBCMS: A Web-native Hierarchical Blockchain CMS for OTT – Contract-aware APIs, Edge-cache Consistency, and HTTP-level SLOs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.2544Keywords:
Blockchain, OTT, Digital Rights Management, Cross layer Verification, Merkle Root Anchoring, Web EngineeringAbstract
Over-the-top (OTT) platforms must expose metadata and digital rights from numerous content providers (CPs) through the web while maintaining low latency and verifiable integrity. This paper presents HBCMS, a hierarchical blockchain-based content management system that separates contract-aware governance in the upper layer from high-rate metadata management in CP-owned lower chains. The web layer is realized through a contract-aware API, a consistency model aligned with edge and browser caching, and HTTP-level service-level objectives (SLOs) linking blockchain verification to observable web behavior. The upper and lower chains are connected via Merkle-root anchoring, and verification proceeds through contract validation, anchor matching, and Merkle proof verification exposed as RESTful endpoints. Anchoring is modeled as a Poisson process that determines the rate required to satisfy verification windows and guides content delivery network (CDN) cache-control policies. In large-scale experiments with up to 1000 CPs, HBCMS achieved about 2.6 k transactions per second (TPS), 0.185 s end-to-end latency, and 99.4% verification success, with lower-chain queries dominating delay. These results provide reproducible guidance for API versioning, cache invalidation, and observability in scalable OTT web architectures.
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