(An) interview study of users’ perceptions of digital content diversity in over-the-top (OTT) platforms

Abstract

Many users of over-the-top (OTT) platform services for digital content such as Netflix or Disney+ report spending a great deal of time searching for content, yet feeling that there is nothing new to watch and find the search experience to be tedious. This thesis conducts an interview study of 9 users of OTT platform services to understand how they perceived the diversity of digital content in their use of these services and explore implications for designing recommender systems for greater content diversity. I first show how diversity of content is of significance beyond conventional metrics of recommender accuracy. The main contributions of my findings are then to unpack how users’ interests in content diversity varies according to their situations, suggesting that calibrating recommendations of more diverse content to users’ shifting situations may enhance user satisfaction on OTT platforms. My analysis contributes to the marketing literature on recommender systems by expanding our understanding of the role of perceived diversity in these systems for enhancing user satisfaction in Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms.