IBC2022 Tech Papers: Global news or romantic movies: how customer values are key for the entertainment experience

Abstract

Recommending content that is tailored toward individual users can support the basic need for instant gratification. Recent developments concerning media and over-the-top services majorly address user needs. However, user needs are short-term oriented, which lacks the possibility to design systems and services to enhance long-term user experience, and support behavior change. Thus, considering long-term oriented user values can be a key element to overcome these challenges in the design of future media services. To initially investigate how users’ values changed over the last 5 years, and thus impacted behavior concerning media consumption, we conducted a survey-based study (N=144). Key findings show a shift towards valuing social connections instead of driving for personal success and achievement. Due to this value shift, our insights outline that watching live broadcasts is not as important anymore as it was in the past. Instead, today’s customers primarily seek personalised entertainment content with unlimited access which can be watched preferably on a big screen without any interruptions. In addition, our data highlights that media consumption and individual media behavior gets significantly impacted by customers’ values. We conclude with a set of recommendations on how to improve the next generation of entertainment services.

Introduction 

Nowadays, personalised media content is available for the majority of over-the-top services and has even made its way to classical TV providers to enhance user experience. However, personalisation is commonly based on data concerning (past) media consumption, occasionally including cross-referencing to other services that might include the usage of location data or data from users interacting in the smart home. In addition to personalisation based on previously consumed media, considering users’ values is a key component for the choice of media services which offers to enhance long-term user experience and customer loyalty. 

Entertainment services are designed to keep the customer subscribed to their service as long as possible. The majority of these services are developed in a way that based on the past data on usage a recommendation is given for future usage. In a variety of attempts, researchers tried to understand what variables to use additionally to improve the prediction accuracy of recommendations: contextual cues such as time, location, environment, or the user’s current emotion, and services were designed to support multi-users, e.g.,by aggregating individual’s recommender system features to produce recommendations for whole groups.

Contrary to using contextual variables, technological variables (like devices), or behavior, we argue that values can be a driver when it comes to the long-term adoption of products and technology, and thus values can be a key to extending current recommendation systems as well as entertainment services overall.

When addressing values a standard method in social science is to use self-reported data. This self-reported data of course is subjective and can be biased. The goal of this work is not to achieve an objective measure, but to enhance the perceived experience of users, depending on how they see the world.

We demonstrate in this paper how users’ self-reported value perception relates to media consumption and media behavior and outline how this can shape the next generation of entertainment services. Based on an online survey, we investigated users’ current values and how they shifted over time in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Grounded on the data gathered, we outline inspirational ideas on how to best satisfy customers’ personal values and support value shifts for the future design of media services.