Giving and Following Recommendations on Video-on-Demand Services

Abstract

This is an empirical paper about giving, receiving and following recommendations on Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, including results on gender-specific differences. Based upon a model for infor-mation behavior on VoD services, we applied an online survey and generated 1,258 valid question-naires from active VoD users. Participants receive recommendations from the systems once a week on average, but they follow them only occasionally. They give actively recommendations to other people sever-al times a month. Users do not receive recommenda-tions from other users as often as from the services (only several times a month); however, they follow those personal recommendations more often. The most important source for receiving personal rec-ommendations is face-to-face communication. Obvi-ously, VoD users follow personal recommendations from other people more than suggestions from algo-rithmically generated recommender systems. Besides, self-determined content selection following intrinsic motivation is important. The findings are of interest for research on digital and social media and for VoD services.