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What Impacts Consumers’ Attitude towards Streaming: Digital Piracy vs Paid Subscriptions

Student: Filimonova Diana

Supervisor: Alexander Pronin

Faculty: St.Petersburg School of Economics and Management

Educational Programme: Management (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 8

Year of Graduation: 2019

The entertainment market occupies a significant position in the current global economy. The shift to the popularity of series from films and television in the industry is abruptly sensed. At the same time, the new market niche is actively evolving. This niche is comprised of digital streaming services which give the opportunity for the target audience to use digital content using a paid subscription, that is a freemium business model. However, there is a huge threat to the business in the field of entertainment in the form of digital piracy, whose consumption throughout the world, and especially in Russia, remains at an unsatisfactory level. Moreover, this illegal sharing and use of digital media are considered extremely harmful to business, whose model is based on the transfer or lease of property rights or the right to view content. The relevance of this study is confirmed by the fact that at the moment it is necessary to understand the key factors that force people to pay for digital products, and not be generated to pirated content. In this paper, we use an online-distributed questionnaire, as an instrument, which presupposes the collection of answers of 201 respondents due to question with filter, dividing the respondents into quazi-experimental and control groups. The questionnaire consists of six blocks, based on some socio-cognitive models: theory of planned behaviour, ethics and deterrence theory. Questions in the questionnaire are devoted to consumers' preferences on the Internet, commitment to streaming services, the experience of digital piracy and socio-demographic data to determine the respondent’s portrait. The analysis is conducted using econometric models, such as custom tables, factor analysis, the reliability analysis, analysis of variance (ANOVA), based on the program SPSS. Our findings suggest that fear of legal consequences is negatively related to consumer’s intention to pirate digital products. Also, we obtained some practical results from the analysis with socio-demographic variables. Thus, people who spend most of their time on the Internet on social networks are more prone to online piracy. But the less a person spends time on the Internet, on the whole, the less he is inclined to pirate media content. As a result of research, it was obtained that females are less willing to engage in digital piracy and are more likely to purchase a paid subscription to the streaming service than males. At the same time, it was revealed that higher incomes of respondents do not reduce their commitment to digital piracy. Based on this pattern of results, we offer theoretical and practical implications. Keywords: series, digital piracy, streaming services, consumer behavior

Full text (added May 27, 2019)

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