Digital Cable: Exploring Factors Associated With Early Adoption

Abstract

Digital cable is a technological innovation featuring interactivity, which is still in its infancy. This study identifies a profile of early digital cable subscribers based on a telephone survey. The study results indicate that digital cable subscribers are more likely to watch television, subscribe to premium services, perceive their cable operator to be technologically progressive, and express greater satisfaction with current cable service compared to analog-only subscribers. It was also found that the more people watch television, have premium channels, and evaluate their cable operator as innovative toward technology, the sooner they can be expected to upgrade to new cable services. Implications for cable service structuring and marketing behaviors are also discussed.

Price, Programming and Potential Competition in US Cable Television Markets

“…DirecTV (along with Stanley Hubbard's USSB), launched the first successful high powered DBS system in 1994 as an all-digital system allowing it to deliver four or more video channels per satellite transponder for a total of 150 channels (Southwick 1998). More recently, cable entrepreneurs have utilized digital signal compression technology to launch a number of additional services such as digital cable (designed to directly counter DBS's competitive threat), near video on demand/video on demand, high speed Internet access, and a variety of other interactive television services (Kang 2002;Rizzuto and Wirth 2002). Over-the-air television broadcasters are in the process of utilizing digital signal compression technology to convert the over-the-air broadcast system from analog to digital (Van Tassel, 2001).…”

Innovation diffusion: The need for more accurate consumer insight. Illustration of the PSAP scale as a segmentation instrument

“…26 Traditional assumptions about 'earlier adopters' being typically male, younger, more highly educated, having a higher income and a larger family size, owning relatively more ICTs and using these at a higher frequency [27][28][29][30] etc are no longer typical or consistent in the ITC environment. [31][32][33][34] Segment profiles based on demographics, media usage and media ownership -traditionally assumed to be applicable to several products and product categories -are not that reliable anymore. Therefore, in line with authors stating 'attitudinal variables' to be more powerful predictors of innovative adoption behaviour when compared to the above-mentioned demographic and media-related variables, 35,36 many emphasised the importance of predictors or adoption determinants such as 'social influence', 37,38 'network externalities', 39,40 'perceived complexity', 41,42 'perceived trialability', 43,44 'perceived compatibility', 45,46 'relative advantage', 47,48 'willingness to pay', 49,50 'optimism', 51,52 'tangibles', 53,54 and 'image'.…”

The determinants of purchasing the charged contents in the smart-media environment

“…Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) define the innovative user with people whose willingness to take risk for the new product or innovation is high. In addition, Lin (2004) categorize the innovative user with the group choosing the web-casting, Kang (2002) categorize the innovative user with people who adopt to pay broadcasting, which is introduced in 1996. In this paper, we categorize the information producer with people who use the new data storage technology like cloud service and operate own internet café or blog and use social network service (SNS) to share the information.…”