STATEMENT ABOUT THE INDEPENDENT CHARACTER OF THE MASTER THESIS 3 АННОТАЦИЯ 3
ABSTRACT 5
Introduction 7
Chapter 1. Literature Review 8
1.1 Consumer behavior 8
1.1.1. Decision-making process 9
1.1.2. Online consumer behavior 11
1.2. Streaming services 16
1.2.1 Video streaming services 18
1.2.2. Piracy and legal streaming 21
1.2.3 Market of video streaming services 24
Conclusions on literature review 28
Chapter 2. Research methodology 29
2.1 Research Approach 30
2.2 Research Model Constructs 31
2.2.1. Data analysis procedures 36
Chapter 3. Data analysis 37
3.1. Reliability and validity analysis 39
3.2 Regression analysis 41
3.3 Theoretical and managerial implications 47
3.4 Limitations and further research 50
Conclusion 51
References: 52
Appendix 61
The penetration of Internet technologies, emergence of mobile devices have had a very serious impact on our daily lives, but it has dealt the greatest blow to business representatives. Companies that were not ready for transformation lost their market position and opened the way for various businesses that brought innovation to the market. Familiar theories about the direction of consumer behavior began to lose their relevance and there was a great need to fill the knowledge gap about how users behave in the online environment. Companies, at some point, were forced to act blindly, trying to find the desires of consumers, and those who succeeded, in particular technology companies, are leaders in capitalization (Tradingview). Most of these companies began to create ecosystems that began to occupy their niches in completely different markets.
The introduction of the Internet into most areas of human life has led to the need to study user behavior in the online environment, behavior in the presence of a greater breadth of choice has undergone changes (Chiu et al., 2006, Kim et al., 2008). The growth of scientific works devoted to the study of consumer behavior in various areas of the online environment followed. This trend has also embraced the emergence of scientific papers on the transition of users from cable television to video streaming services.
New technologies that constantly make changes to business products create a need to update and test their impact on consumer behavior. The ubiquitous penetration of technologies creates gaps in their research. Existing work related to video streaming services has a gap in the analysis of technological innovations, and also these works are most often focused on analyzing the preference of users between cable TV or video streaming services, rather than assessing the impact of factors on the intention to use the video streaming service they use. Within the framework of this master's work, the factors that can influence the preference of users of a particular video streaming service, including modern technologies that are used in current products, are considered.
These two research questions help to reach the goal of a thesis:
RQ1: Which factors affect on users’ preference of video streaming service?
RQ2: What is the relative importance of these factors in consumers' intention to use video streaming services?
The concept of writing this master's thesis is based on combining both theoretical and practical contributions. The study consists of a questionnaire that tests 7 hypotheses and allows you to analyze factors that have not been evaluated before. Also, the results of this study serve as an occasion for video streaming services to assess the current alignment of consumer preferences.
In this research we analyzed factors that may affect on user’s choice of video streaming service. By analyzing 7 hypotheses we accepted 5 out of 7. Our study based on data gathered from 483 respondents provides insights about topic of research. Data was distributed among users over 18 years with experience of using paid video streaming services. The distribution by gender between participants of survey was even, the share of male is 47.2% and female 52.8%.
We got answers on both of our research questions, for first by accepting hypotheses, for the second by checking beta values from table with regression analysis.
RQ1: Which factors affect on users’ preference of video streaming service?
RQ2: What is the relative importance of these factors in consumers' intention to use video streaming services?
According on the analysis of literature review if was found that there is a gap in analyzing video streaming services based on recently developed technological innovations that companies provide to their users. One more problem is that companies compete not just between paid services, but there is a huge competition from pirate industry that require from video streaming platforms to find ways increase the competitive advantage of paid services against pirate web resources (MUSO). We also analyzed the market of video streaming services in first chapter and find out that there are some top players that dominate on the market and the main company in this list is Netflix.
The second chapter of master thesis dedicated to description of research methodology. For this analysis was chosen survey method that based on hypotheses from literature review. Model for this master thesis was fully built on literature review and all factors checked their effect on intention to use video streaming services. Questionnaire for survey includes 35 questions and was finished by 483 respondents.
The third chapter of master thesis dedicated to analysis of gathered data. Were conducted stages for checking validity and reliability of our sample. During this process data met all requirements and was of enough quality for conducting regression analysis. As a result, were accepted 5 hypotheses that these factors affect on intention to use video streaming services: content quality, user-friendly interface, auto-recommendation system, device compatibility acceptable pricing policy. And rejected the effect of intention to use video streaming services by 2 hypotheses: content variety and social interaction.
