The effects of Covid-19 in audience’s purchase behaviors and valuations of legal streaming video platforms’ brands

: examining the moderating role of the type of content in audience’s engagement with legal streaming video, pre and since-Covid-19

Abstract

The present health crisis resulted in behavioral and psychological consumption shifts. Amongthe industries that seized it as an opportunity for expanding is the Over-the-Top (OTT) industry.Particularly, legal streaming video platforms’ brands could enhance their relationships withaudience, especially during lockdowns. A variety of content types are provided by theseplatforms, namely series and films. The latter are however consumed in movie theaters as well.The subscriber-platform relationship is thus not linear, and different viewing practices can benoticed. Based on previous academic research, an empirical study was conducted, with theintention of examining Covid-19’s impact on audience’s purchase behaviors and valuations ofstreaming platforms’ brands. Also, the potential moderating role of the content type inaudience’s engagement with streaming is to be understood. Findings show that audience’spurchase behaviors and brand valuations were indeed improved in general, namely engagement,purchase intention, willingness-to-pay, brand affect, trust, loyalty, and perceived quality.Besides, the presence of a moderating role of the content type was observed, series consumersbeing more engaged with streaming. Finally, positive correlations between brand affect andtrust, and brand loyalty, as well as between brand affect and purchase intention were observed, not being the case between brand affect and willingness-to-pay. This thesis contributes to OTTand movie-theater industries, by providing conclusions about audience’s mindset in a pandemic context, their quest for video entertainment, and opportunities for both industries’ value propositions.

Date of Award	18 Oct 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria Estarreja (Supervisor)