Bernardo Cardoso’s PhD defense takes place on the 14th January, at 3:00 p.m., with the topic Unification in Audiovisual Content Consumption: contributions to the user experience and suggestions for operators | A Unificação no Consumo de Conteúdos Audiovisuais: contributos para a experiência de utilização e sugestões para operadores.
Bernardo Cardoso is a student of the PhD programme in Information and Communication in Digital Platforms and his supervisor is Jorge Ferraz de Abreu (DigiMedia, UA).
DigiMedia members are invited to participate in this important moment in person.
Abstract:
Pay-TV offers have been undergoing a process of homogenization in terms of features and content. However, in recent years, due to major changes in technology and business models, a series of fragmentations are causing an imbalance and important changes in the television ecosystem. Among these changes, catch-up TV, and platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ and YouTube, have emerged as new ways to watch on-demand content, complementing the traditional broadcast TV. Enabled by these platforms, the television concept is also evolving to include new formats and models. Simultaneously, television is no longer restricted to the TV set, being now available on several devices, allowing the viewers to watch the content they want, wherever and whenever they want. However, these changes, although presenting numerous advantages, have also brought a more complex user experience, as they force the viewer to jump between several applications, use different devices and subscribe to multiple services. This presented the opportunity to start a research project aiming to innovate the user experience of the TV viewer, by promoting a content unification approach while introducing new interaction modes and business models. Following a Design Thinking methodology, the project tried to better understand the problems that TV viewers were facing and observe their behaviours and choices. This highlighted a demand for content unification and personalization approaches, enabling an ideation cycle focused on these concepts, which culminated in the elaboration of a prototype that gave tangibility to the selected ideas. This prototype was subjected to an expert evaluation and, given the positive results, granted the green light for the project to proceeded with new prototyping and evaluation phases. Those took place initially in a laboratory setup and, later, in a field trial in a residential environment, for a month. In these evaluations, a triangulation of standardized surveys and various qualitative assessment instruments were employed, and their positive results validated the approach followed by the project. In this way, it became possible to move forward with a transfer, from academia to industry, of the researched unification concepts, thus increasing the level of validation. Finally, the combination of an analysis of the current offers of the biggest American technological platforms, with the knowledge previously obtained on the present research, allowed the elaboration of a set of proposals to improve the user experience of the TV viewers, complemented with a set of suggestions to pay-TV operators, so they can, with these proposals, introduce innovative and differentiated offers to the market.
More information available HERE
