FinPilot2 Final Report – User Acceptance of Mobile TV Services ...

Summary
FinPilot2 study piloted mobile television services in Digita’s DVB-H network in the
Helsinki area with a panel of 27 users. The panel was using mobile television services
with Nokia N77 phones from July 2007 to February 2008 as a part of their normal
lives. In addition to commercially available services, the panellists were introduced
with 10 different pilot services. User feedback of the pilot services was gathered
with web surveys and interviews.
The usage was established with about half of the respondents using mobile TV at
least once a week. The users described many usage routines that they had adopted.
Mobile TV was watched in the morning when having breakfast and late in the
evening to keep from disturbing the rest of the family. Short usage sessions during
commuting and when having breaks were common. Often mobile TV was used as an
extension to primary TV and as a background noise.
The value of mobile TV was seen rather in entertainment than in useful
information. Still, news in a wider sense was the content of most interest to the
users. Taking mobile TV into use was found easy. The quality of sound and especially
the quality of image got very positive feedback. Even though the users were
informed about the limited coverage of DVB-H broadcast, coverage was mentioned
first when asked about problems in use. With the new TV channels and video on
demand, there seems to be a need for easier overview of the content and also firmer
connections to services on other media.
Familiar add-on services such as MTV3 and Nelonen teletext services were very well
accepted, and it was a positive surprise to the panellists that these services offered
some better functionalities than conventional teletext. Also the local teletext
service, Super teletext, got quite good feedback.
The panellists saw that add-on services can be made easy to access and use.
However, in the pilot setting some add-on services required extra installation
efforts and some services were introduced as separate applications. This lowered
the grades for ease of adoption and ease of use. Main problems in taking the add-on
services into use were related to knowing the existence of those services.
Mobile TV broadcasting content is already interesting and attractive to the users.
Interactive services will require learning from the users so that they will get used
to looking for those add-on services. The path to add-on interactive services should
go from familiar content such as teletext to more versatile services. The potential
of the mobile phone should be utilised to provide the users with even more topical,
even more local and even more personal content. These kinds of services would
change mobile TV from an additional TV set to a medium in its own right.
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