The Antecedents of Consumer Satisfaction Toward OTT Platforms During COVID-19 Lockdown in India

The outbreak of COVID-19 has emerged as the biggest threat to human life. It has changed the entire lifestyle of human beings concerning their emotional stability and cognitive development. Enjoyment is one of the emotions and acts as a positive stimulus that a consumer used to feel and seeks for a balanced life. Since the nationwide lockdown was implemented on March 25, 2020, people have turned restless about how to enjoy themselves at home, as all of their options of going out were being shattered. It was the time when continuous innovations in the form of digital content through over-the-top (OTT) platforms flourished and provided an affordable and diversified entertainment source to consumers. These OTT services help consumers to view the contents via the Internet directly. Furthermore, it has drastically changed people's preferences toward diversified content based on their choices. This study aims to explore the various determinants affecting consumer satisfaction toward the OTT platforms amid COVID-19 crisis in India. The study's main findings revealed that among the demographic variables, age group of the consumer largely influences their satisfaction toward OTT platforms. Moreover, work from home, affordability, convenience, and content quality are the significant determinants affecting consumer satisfaction levels toward OTT platforms. The study is relevant to the current marketing scenario, as it provides useful insights for the content developers of the major OTT platforms such as Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, Voot, and many others to enhance the consumer satisfaction in the terms of digital content consumption.

Digitized Entertainment - Factors influencing Consumer Adoption of OTT Platforms

People's way of consuming media changed tremendously with rapid technological improvements and increased internet penetration levels across India due to emergence of over-the-top media services (OTT) platforms. COVID-19 outbreak has tremendously increased the demand for OTT streaming channels like Netflix, Amazon prime, Zee 5, Alt Balaji and Disney Hotstar which transformed the world of entertainment and media by contributing mind blowing services during the lockdown period.This research paper is an attempt to study the shift in media consumption patterns from old ways of entertainment like cinema, television to new ways of entertainment like OTT platforms, study and analyze the consumer preference towards choice of OTT platforms, watching habits of online over the top (OTT) applications among Indian viewers. © 2023 IEEE.

Impact of Covid Pandemic on OTT Streaming Services

Starting from Cable connections to various options in satellite TV brands, the transition paved the way gradually for free content on applications like YouTube, which further led to the demand for quality content on OTT platforms. Over-the- Top or OTT is the abbreviation for "over-the-top” which is a new age streaming of films and TV series over the web without the need for traditional cable, or satellite pay-TV providers;the consumers can stream across multiple gadgets according to our time convenience. Beginning in the late 90s, the early 2000s marked the era of Television streaming in India. The first OTT application launched in India was BigFix, which changed the course of content consumption in our country. The Television industry once driven by cable and satellite operators has transitioned into a consumer-driven domain. Unlike TV, which requires a cable connection or an antenna, OTT material is delivered directly over Online platforms and paid for directly by viewers. The implications are that the consumers may get OTT services including video, voice, messaging and audio services, at any time and from any location, which serves to be a significant advantage over traditional TV programming. In this paper, we focus on how this paradigm change took place and what impact it has created, especially since the pandemic. © 2023 IEEE.

Original Contents, Celebrities and Proximity. How Netflix Spain used Instagram to Bring its Catalogue to Young People during the Pandemics

This study focuses on how Netflix Spain harnessed Instagram to acquaint young people with its catalogue during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the sudden increase in OTT consumption. This led Netflix Spain to adapt its social media strategies and production release dates to a situation without parallel and in the face of intense competition. We analyze the messages during the state of alarm in Spain (from 15 March to 21 June of 2020), when Netflix was the most consumed OTT service. Netflix promoted recently released productions and used proximity strategies, both to GenZ and to Spanish audience, such as toning down with humor the daily problems of lockdown, using juvenile slang ("crush", "shipping"), referring to the habits of young people (taking selfies, sending audio messages) and using the social media of the cast of their most popular series, promoting them as "Netflix celebrities" and emphasizing their good-looks and sexual attractive. © 2023 Universidad Complutense de Madrid. All rights reserved.

COVID-19 Lockdown and Disney+ strategy on social networks on its launch during the State of alarm in Spain

The launch of Disney+ in Spain in March 2020 coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and a period of home confinement for many Spaniards. This study examines the advertising and engagement strategy used by Disney+ on Twitter and Instagram, analyzing 2,268 messages. The platform's social media use is similar to that of its competitors, with Twitter used for user engagement and Instagram used for content promotion. However, the study finds that the platform missed the opportunity to emphasize its unique qualities and appeal to the brand's values. Despite this, Disney+ generated significant engagement during its launch month, reflecting high levels of user anticipation. Popular original productions such as The Mandalorian and Aladdin, as well as acquired content like The Simpsons, indicate the brand's focus on a family or broad-spectrum target audience, in contrast to the younger and niche audiences favored by its competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Communication & Society is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, S.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Caged, helpless but not bored: consumption values derived from over-the-top platforms during pandemic

Purpose: The use of over-the-top (OTT) platforms grew substantially after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. With the pandemic receding, there is a concern that users may not continue with their subscriptions. To counter this, OTT service providers must strategize proactively to retain and acquire new users once the pandemic abates. Positing that understanding the consumption values that users ascribe to OTT platform usage can provide useful customer retention insights, the purpose of this paper is to use the theory of consumption value (TCV) to study the values that users derived from their use of OTT following the onset of the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The mixed-method approach is used to collect qualitative and quantitative data. Analysis of qualitative responses collected through interviews of 12 current OTT platform users helped identify two categories of OTT platform-specific values: attribute-level and benefit-based. Next, the study examined the association of values thus identified with one another, as well as with continued intentions to use OTT platforms, by analyzing data collected from 371 existing users. Findings: The findings indicated that functional value quality and social value, representing the attribute-level values, were positively associated with two benefit-based values – functional value price and emotional value (EMV). Next, EMV was not only associated with intentions but also partially mediated the association of attribute-level values with intentions. Premium subscription purchased and increased viewing time were confirmed to have moderating effects on the association between attribute-level and benefit-based values. Originality/value: The study is amongst the foremost research initiatives to examine consumption values derived from OTT platform usage after the onset of the pandemic. Its novelty also comes from its identifying OTT platform-specific consumption values for the first time and adding a new dimension to the TCV by examining the interplay of these values in the OTT platform context. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Predicting the Pre-release Success of a Web Series' Season

With the onset of COVID-19, OTT platforms have become popular. With this added popularity, many production companies tend to release their content on platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney + Hotstar, etc. Through this research work, we tend to check the impact of different classical factors like genre, age certification, time of release, the platform of release, etc. as well as various social factors like the sentiment of the audience around the trailer, songs, and success of the previous season in predicting the success of the pre-release season of an English web series by creating our dataset. This will enhance the business strategies that production houses can use to improve their profits. We have trained different classification models like Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, Multinomial Naive Bayes, and hyper tuned the parameters of Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbours. We have also created a Multi-Layer Perceptron model and an ensemble classifier and trained them on our dataset. The best accuracy of 76.66% was achieved by the Hard Voting type ensemble classifier. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

COVID-19 impact on Global Network Performance

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has created a profound impact on every sector of our life. The most significant effect of this global pandemic is "global lockdown.>> The lockdown has brought many changes in our lifestyle. One of the substantial changes in the usage of network connectivity. Many people have started to work from home, the number of online learning other uses like the OTT, social media, etc., have increased. It's observed that internet traffic has significantly increased by 25%-30%. In this paper, the authors have analyzed the global network connectivity performance concerning the changes in usage. They examined various service providers' or companies' feedback to these unprecedented conditions. The authors used secondary research methodology for quantitative analysis to understand the increase in usage. Also, this pandemic is opening up new opportunities for the service provider as this pandemic is accelerating remote working, so the service provider is going for more and more automation which reduces the field headcount and the cost. Also, operators have started to offer new collaboration apps, video conferencing tools, and learning platforms which open up new business opportunities. Many new businesses have begun to transform their business in digital, which also opens up a unique opportunity.

Impact of COVID-19 and Online Streaming Services on the Movie Theater

Movie Theaters in India face a big crisis amid COVID-19, which leads to the shutdown of Theaters for more than five months. In the meantime, Online Streaming Services are expanding their business and revenue like never before. This scenario raises the very prominent questions (1) whether the movie theater business will survive this hard time and get back to normal growth and business once COVID-19 cases will reduce. The situation gets back to `old normal'. (2) Will Online Streaming services and Movie Theater business co-exist in the future, as Satellite TV and Movie Theater exist for many decades. Based on data from an empirical survey conducted among regular moviegoers, this paper questions the claims of the industry that the Movie Theater business is in danger due to the emergence of online streaming services. It has been observed that the increase in traffic on these online streaming services is mainly because of the lockdown situation, and once theater reopens and the COVID-19 health crisis went, people will get back to Theaters in a large number. Data from the reopening of Theaters in other countries are also showing the same result.

Shaping OTT Movie Consumption through Immersive Cinema: A Qualitative Investigation of Consumer Perspectives

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entertainment sector saw a worldwide disruption with restrictions on outdoor activities. Consequently, consumers turned towards video and music streaming services for their entertainment consumption. Several film studios have taken the digital release route on over-the-top (OTT) sites to avoid revenue losses and indefinite delays. However, these non-theatrical OTT film releases need to experiment with different strategies to bring the experiences to par with theatrical ones. This exploratory study aims to provide insights on whether Immersive Cinema can be used to imitate the physical world through digital simulation on OTT platforms to gain credibility in a competitive entertainment market. We conducted semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 21 consumers and Focus Group Discussions with 14 MBA students to understand perspectives about Immersive Cinema consumption on OTT platforms and its potential when compared to traditional theatrical releases. Using the findings of this study, OTT platforms can curate their new films as a direct alternative to theatrical releases. © 2022 MDI.

OTT platforms resilience to COVID-19 – a study of business strategies and consumer media consumption in India

Purpose>COVID-19 preventive measures disrupted the media and entertainment business ecosystem, increased over the top (OTT) consumption, brought new OTT players, thus increased competition, and shaped consumer behaviour and habits. Despite this knowledge, in-depth insights into OTT's consumer behaviour, new usage habit and strategies used by subscription-based OTT platforms to maintain resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic are unknown. This paper aims to fill the two gaps in the extant OTT literature.Design/methodology/approach>This study used Eisenhardt's multiple case studies approach to derive the strategies used by the top-performing subscription-based OTT platforms in India. Moreover, a purposive semi-structured Google survey was used to explore consumers' OTT experience during the pandemic. This study analysed data using NVivo 12 (survey) and MS Excel 2010 (case studies).Findings>This study derived seven resilient OTT strategies;competitive low pricing, enhancing customer experience, launching innovative service plans, content localisation, strategic collaboration, flexibility in technology adoption and proactive sales promotion. Consequent to adopting these strategies, consumers' usage of OTT evolved from occasional to habitual. Convenience, ease of accessibility, risk of contracting COVID-19, variety and quality of content, online reviews and affordability drive consumer preference for OTT. Also, this study revealed consumers' varied OTT experiences.Originality/value>The contribution is two-fold;the derived strategies for maintaining resilience and the in-depth insights into habit formation and consumer behaviour during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is valuable for media and entertainment stakeholders like streaming service providers, OTT services, cable operators, etc.

Predicting the Pre-release Success of a Web Series' Season

With the onset of COVID-19, OTT platforms have become popular. With this added popularity, many production companies tend to release their content on platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney + Hotstar, etc. Through this research work, we tend to check the impact of different classical factors like genre, age certification, time of release, the platform of release, etc. as well as various social factors like the sentiment of the audience around the trailer, songs, and success of the previous season in predicting the success of the pre-release season of an English web series by creating our dataset. This will enhance the business strategies that production houses can use to improve their profits. We have trained different classification models like Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, Multinomial Naive Bayes, and hyper tuned the parameters of Random Forest and K-Nearest Neighbours. We have also created a Multi-Layer Perceptron model and an ensemble classifier and trained them on our dataset. The best accuracy of 76.66% was achieved by the Hard Voting type ensemble classifier. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Analyzing The Factors Affecting Media Consumer Trends During The COVID-19 Period - The Rise Of Web Series By Different Otts V/S Traditional TV Serials In India

In the recent decade OTT platforms, also known as "Over the top," have seen a tremendous rise in the number of consumers and also gained a huge market share in the entertainment industry. The OTT service most users probably interact with regularly is video OTT. Services like Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar are video OTT services that provide users with a number of programming options, both in terms of a licensed library of TV shows and films and original programming. The study's objective is to carry out a detailed study of OTT (over-the-top) platforms, and how and why OTT platforms are rising in India. This study also investigates OTT platforms at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that recent years have witnessed several films emerging as pan-India hits, and the rise of alternative platforms has only widened the opportunities for actors and filmmakers. This study concludes that there is no competition between theatres and digital platforms filmmakers must up their game. OTT has resulted in more opportunities and redefined viewership patterns. Films and other mediums will thrive together because the same actors and makers are exploring different platforms. Copyright © 2023 Ubiquity Press. All rights reserved.

A Study on User Satisfaction and Intention to Continue Use of OTT Platform Digital Content Provision Service

As for the OTT platform, as the commercialization of the high-speed Internet technology called 5G began, the development of download and streaming technology also accelerated, and the market entry began in earnest. In addition, as the COVID-19 pandemic has occurred around the world, many changes have occurred in the platform industry that provides digital content. In order to maintain users' subscriptions to OTT platform digital content services and to understand the factors of continuous use, it is necessary to study the perceived value, satisfaction, and intention to continue using OTT services.Therefore, this study was conducted based on the value-based acceptance model to study the factors that can be expected for OTT platform digital content services and the factors that the perceived value of OTT services affects satisfaction and intention to continue use. For empirical analysis, SPSS ver.23 will analyze the influence of path coefficients on playability, convenience, usefulness, technical risk, cost risk, and security risk that affect the perceived value of OTT digital content services, and determine whether or not to adopt t value (1.96 or more) and p value 0.05. In addition, domestic and foreign OTT platform digital content providers will derive and present factors to improve or upgrade through causal analysis of digital content provision services that are used the most among overseas/domestic OTT platforms. © 2022 IEEE.

The Impact of Ott Platforms on the Short Film Genre

Short films have always been there but in the last few years, the craving for the format has increased. The main reason for its popularity is the variety for the audience and a learning experience for the filmmakers. Platforms like Netflix and Vimeo are the most influential participants in the business, catering to movie makers across the world. For millennials, short films are a way to learn and for the experts, it is a way to explore. OTT platforms have emerged stronger than ever since 2020 and that is because of the freedom it provides for filmmakers to explore global genres bypassing the commercially burdensome processes of the industry. The audience is looking to explore new, woke and informed content, they are tapping into global industries to connect with the contents, characters, and the ideas that hold a mirror to the society. The short film industry provides a myriad of genres and ideas that are focused on connecting with the audience and keeping them engaged for twenty to forty minutes. This article explores the impact of the OTT platforms on the short film categories and the opportunities, and value it has created in the industry. It will also discuss the importance of OTT platforms, their regulations and the growing demand for the new content. We will also look at some global industry data and analyse investment trends in the OTT space.

Analysis on OTT Platformsin India: Its Rise and Future

The internet or net as it is known today has become an essential part of our living experience. Most industries operations have been drastically altered by the internet. Because of the increasing use of the internet among the audience, the Indian entertainment sectorhas seen significant changes in its operations. Gone are the times when we had to wait a week to catch up on the latest episode of our favourite television series or look forward to blockbuster movies being shown on large screens. Consumers increasingly becoming well-versed in the new technology and the customization and personalization of products and streaming services this technology provides,are the reasons for the surge in the usage of OTT platforms--Platforms for online video content screening and streaming--and therefore preferring it over the traditional television/cable system. The future of these OTT platforms is even assuring as these online services are being made more accessible by the internet's availability.Also, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), OTT platforms are able to optimize their delivery as they can learn about their customers preferences and hence give a user rice experience. This review paper will attempt to explore the rise of these OTT platforms, factors influencing their success, how Covid played an important role in its growth andtheir future.

Transnational Proximity and Universality in Korean Culture: Analysis of Squid Game and BTS

By utilizing transnational proximity as a primary theoretical framework, I analyze the reasons why global audiences beyond Asia prefer contemporary Korean popular culture to other cultural products. I investigate several distinctive cultural programs and Korean screen spheres—BTS and Squid Game (2021) in particular—as well as fan communities. I mainly discuss whether “transnational proximity” based on similar socio-cultural experiences, including social inequality and social injustice, which are rampant in late capitalist society, works as a new theoretical frame in comprehending the global success of Hallyu. Finally, I discuss whether transnational proximity plays a pivotal role in determining the growth of local popular culture in the global cultural sphere. © 2022 Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.

Server-Side Versus Client-Side Synchronization for Watch Together Applications Using CMAF Low Latency

Watch together is an application that was widely deployed during the COVID-19 global health crisis. Early results show a much longer viewing time when the feature is activated. The synchronization between the A/V streamed content, combined with the need to have a low, end-to-end latency compatible with the user interactions through integrated social media apps, is challenging, especially when watch together is deployed on all devices. The legacy approach used by existing watch together applications is to rely on a master user that will drive the other members of the group using an overlay control protocol to make sure that all the players will synchronize their playback. This article proposes a scheme that uses the built-in synchronization provided in Common Media Application Format (CMAF) low latency for both Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), enabling a subsecond time delay between clients in the same geographical location. © 2002 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Inc.

OTT platforms resilience to COVID-19-a study of business strategies and consumer media consumption in India

Purpose COVID-19 preventive measures disrupted the media and entertainment business ecosystem, increased over the top (OTT) consumption, brought new OTT players, thus increased competition, and shaped consumer behaviour and habits. Despite this knowledge, in-depth insights into OTT's consumer behaviour, new usage habit and strategies used by subscription-based OTT platforms to maintain resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic are unknown. This paper aims to fill the two gaps in the extant OTT literature. Design/methodology/approach This study used Eisenhardt's multiple case studies approach to derive the strategies used by the top-performing subscription-based OTT platforms in India. Moreover, a purposive semi-structured Google survey was used to explore consumers' OTT experience during the pandemic. This study analysed data using NVivo 12 (survey) and MS Excel 2010 (case studies). Findings This study derived seven resilient OTT strategies;competitive low pricing, enhancing customer experience, launching innovative service plans, content localisation, strategic collaboration, flexibility in technology adoption and proactive sales promotion. Consequent to adopting these strategies, consumers' usage of OTT evolved from occasional to habitual. Convenience, ease of accessibility, risk of contracting COVID-19, variety and quality of content, online reviews and affordability drive consumer preference for OTT. Also, this study revealed consumers' varied OTT experiences. Originality/value The contribution is two-fold;the derived strategies for maintaining resilience and the in-depth insights into habit formation and consumer behaviour during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is valuable for media and entertainment stakeholders like streaming service providers, OTT services, cable operators, etc.

Prediction of Content Success and Cloud-Resource Management in Internet-of-Media-Things Environments

In Internet-of-Media-Things (IoMT) environments, users can access and view high-quality Over-the-Top (OTT) media services anytime and anywhere. As the number of OTT platform users has increased, the original content offered by such OTT platforms has become very popular, further increasing the number of users. Therefore, effective resource-management technology is an essential aspect for reducing service-operation costs by minimizing unused resources while securing the resources necessary to provide media services in a timely manner when the user’s resource-demand rates change rapidly. However, previous studies have investigated efficient cloud-resource allocation without considering the number of users after the release of popular content. This paper proposes a technology for predicting and allocating cloud resources in the form of a Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM)-based reinforcement-learning method that provides information for OTT service providers about whether users are willing to watch popular content using the Korean Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (KoBERT). Results of simulating the proposed technology verified that efficient resource allocation can be achieved by maintaining service quality while reducing cloud-resource waste depending on whether content popularity is disclosed.