Consumers’ Perspective On A Modified Advertisement-Based E-Business Model For Preponed Online Movie Exhibition

Abstract

In contemporary times, watching movies online becomes more and more popular. This new trend comes along with new threats for the movie industry, in particular online movie piracy. Existing business model for online video on demand can hardly compete with illegitimate sources. Therefore this thesis is aimed to provide a concept for a business model that provides movie content online which differentiates from predecessors. Movies are aimed to be shown parallelly to the theatrical release, what hasn’t been done before. The model is financed by advertisements, while the length of advertisement breaks will be comparable to TV advertisements. As this represents a trade-off for viewers, the consumer perspective and perception of such a business model will be analysed within this paper. So far such an idea has not been conceptualized nor studied. Academic literature merely focused on piracy, consumption of online movie content, respectively online advertisement. A combination and concurrence of these factors remained untouched so far. Consequently, this study examines how consumers perceive such a business model by interviewing participants in group interviews. Students from several countries participated in this study and gave basic indications how the proposed business model is perceived. Furthermore suggestions are given how it has to be conceptualized in order to be attractive for customers.