Merging social computing with content: a proposal of a new film platform, Avids

ABSTRACT

Film consumers are continuously online and active in various social platforms. This phenomenon has led over-the-top (OTT) providers – empowered by social computing technologies – to establish a social media presence and incorporate elements drawn from social media into their services. However, little is known about existing OTT interfaces and their key social features. This study sought to provide a structured categorisation of the most salient social media features of the best-known applications in the OTT video business. In addition, a new social content network model, Avids, was proposed to connect individuals socially through films. Avids reaches beyond more fixed, functionality-based approaches applied in the development of OTT video sites and focuses on components related to sociality. This approach ensures a unified system in which the overall social media setting is embedded in every functional area of the platform’s architecture, thereby allowing applications to trigger and support social behaviours absent from traditional OTT providers. A purpose-built international online survey was administered to 479 film lovers to assess how Avids’ main features compare with traditional OTT video providers. The questionnaire was based on the technology acceptance model. The results confirm the critical role of sociality in film viewing-related activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social network sites
• over-the-top (OTT) providers
• streaming services
• film-centred sociality
• prototype

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, to broaden its user base and satisfy the growing demand for social interactions, Netflix added the Facebook Open Graph sharing system to its site in March 2013 so that users could link their Netflix and Facebook pages. This system gave users the chance to share movie recommendations with friends in a public forum that could be seen by non-Netflix subscribers (see Knudsen, Kellman, and Jones 2013; Yan, Qian, and Ji 2013; Governo, Teixeira, and Brochado 2017). Although the integration with Facebook was a step in the right direction in terms of more social interactions, Netflix users proved to be unwilling to link their Facebook accounts, which meant that Netflix’s attempt to incorporate social media failed (see Yan, Qian, and Ji 2013). People usually engage in many different social media networks simultaneously for different purposes, and not all film consumers want to log in via general social networks or to share their video viewing habits with friends on Facebook or on other larger providers such as Google+ and Twitter. Most users have a wide range of friends with different interests, with whom users maintain varied levels of intimacy, and they do not want to expose their tastes or historical streaming behaviors to all these friends (see Yan, Qian, and Ji 2013; Sang 2014; Governo, Teixeira, and Brochado 2017).

2 Later in this paper, we discuss in detail the appropriate balance between the seven functional traits in order to facilitate the design and development of a congruent social media strategy for the prototype film service provider.

3 The survey discussed below was conducted to identify key social media features of the most popular OTT video providers in the market. The present study’s constraints meant we could not assess the full range of OTT video services. In addition, by the time this article appears in print, the OTT landscape will have changed further as new services emerge and others disappear.

4 It is important to underline that the present characterisation based on main features needs to be understood as ongoing because the age of social multimedia has sped up the rate of change in platforms that run multimedia applications (Naaman 2012). Given this rapidly changing infrastructure, the site at the time of data collection is likely to be quite different a few months later. Features that a scholar examines in one year may have simply disappeared by the following year. Thus, two studies of a particular website that produce different findings may not be contradictory. They may actually have examined what are, in essence, two different socio-technical contexts (Ellison and Boyd 2013).

5 Indeed, recommendations made by friends are more effective because they are a better fit for users. These endorsements are based on a personal knowledge of users’ tastes, and, these recommendations also have a stronger persuasive power, since friends are considered to be an especially reliable source of information whose opinions users can trust (Girieud 2010; Brown 2013; Yan, Qian, and Ji 2013).

6 To video is available in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoUVd7rOoRU.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [grant number SFRH/BD/51744/2011, UID/ECO/04105/2019]. Aurora Teixeira’s research has been financed by the European Regional Development Fund through COMPETE 2020 – Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) and by Portuguese public funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) in the framework of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006890.