Human Factors Affecting Video Streaming Service Selection

Choosing a video streaming service to subscribe to involves a complex decision-making process consisting of multifaceted factors that consumers must carefully consider. This dissertation identifies and examines the factors influencing consumers’ decisions by reviewing research from diverse fields such as human factors, psychology, economics, and human-computer interaction. The identified factors shaping consumers’ choices, in order of importance, are advertisements, social value, price, content, and content discovery methods. Additionally, this study assesses consumers’ willingness to pay for each factor and examines whether their perceived explanation of their choice of platform aligns with the behavior in the choice experiments. Opportunities for future research are discussed including, the potential for developing an algorithm to determine one’s likelihood of subscribing to a streaming platform based on the choice heuristics outlined in this study.