THE ROLE OF AUDIOVISUAL QUALITY IN MOBILE TELEVISION

Audiovisual quality is an important factor in acceptance and success of new mobile services such as mobile television. The produced quality is always a combination of the development of content and service providers, as well as handset manufacturers. The end result is perceived as a unity by the end users. Audiovisual quality effects consumers’ technology acceptance and adoption of new products. The quality requirements vary between different consumer groups, their needs for contents and usage contexts. The perception of quality is a combination of sensorial, cognitive, emotional and social factors. In this paper, we present how the presented quality factors and requirements can be applied in different levels of subjective quality research. The proposed model sets a framework for testing the complete set of user acceptance criteria of mobile TV audiovisual quality experience. 1. AUDIOVISUAL QUALITY IN MOBILE TELEVISION PRODUCTS AND NEW TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE Mobile devices and mobility set special technical requirements for mobile television and video presentation (e.g low bitrate, framerate, screen size and battery life time). The overall quality of mobile television is created as a sum of technologies developed by different players in the field. The players in the field have been described as the mobile value chain by Funk 2004[4]: Content owner, producer and provider, together with the service provider deliver the content to the user. In addition, the handset manufacturer plays a key role by providing the user interface, including the output devices for the end user to experience the content. User’s experience and perception of quality is built on the combination of content production (content quality, objective quality, coding), service providing (transmission quality) and handset design and implementation (design, application interaction, display quality). The success of the resulting product depends on how well these factors together support the overall experience. Audiovisual quality is a factor in the broader picture of technology acceptance. The technology acceptance model TAM [2] models users’ acceptance of technology as combination of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use, which leads to usage behaviour. Venkatesh and Davis [20] have extended this model by describing factors affecting perceived usefulness in which output quality presents one set of factors [10]. Kaasinen (1995) has developed the model further to Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile Services and emphasises the importance of trust and perceived ease of adoption [10]. Audiovisual quality can be seen as one such output quality factor which affects users’ trust towards a system, and finally the willingness to use the new technology. TAM, with its extensions, illustrates the complexity of how consumers finally adopt a new technology product. Quality levels of the factors listed above (in Section 1) play key roles, however, the final acceptance is a result of a broader picture. To be able to develop acceptable mobile TV product quality, the total effects of the quality factors to the experienced quality need to be investigated. 2. FROM PERCEIVED QUALITY TO