Consumer preferences in video streaming

Sammanfattning: Social media is the undisputed leader regarding video streaming consumption at an international level, to the detriment of SVOD services. We arrived at this observation trying to understand consumer behaviors regarding this phenomenon. Surprised by this, we sought to understand what motivates consumers to watch streaming video. In the literature, scholars seeking to study the motivations and satisfactions (called gratification factors) of consumers in media use are working with the Uses and Gratification Theory. However, while this theory explains the use of a medium, it does not explain the preference of one medium over another. We therefore wanted to use the Uses and Gratifications framework to make this comparison between social media and SVOD, and thus find an explanation for our observation: the superiority of social media. We drew on previous work to construct gratification factors applicable to SVOD, social media and video streaming. To confirm the reliability and validity of these constructs, we conducted a factorial analysis in a quantitative study, using a questionnaire distributed to the French population. Moreover, we used the data from this survey to build explanatory models for the use of social media and SVOD. Therefore, our study shows that the Uses and Gratifications Theory can be used to explain consumers’ preference for social media over SVOD services, by highlighting that the gratification factors which are the most decisive are content, process and social. Moreover, the formation of our constructs (content, social, process and technology gratifications) is the result of our reorganization of the gratifications already considered in the existing literature so that they correspond most accurately to the current behaviors of streaming video consumers. We thus provide a new basic model of analysis, which could be used by other studies on video streaming. From a practical point of view, our study also allows us to suggest to video streaming companies the points on which they can work to meet consumers’ expectations: that is to say on the possibility for users to adapt their consumption to their available time and on the possibility for interactivity directly on the platforms.