The adoption and management of interactive digital TV commerce in Taiwan

Abstract

The introduction of interactive digital television (IDTV) has a major impact on the existing TV operators. It has resulted in fierce market competition and decreased profit margins for the TV industry as a whole. Accordingly, the TV industry needs to look for new ways to manage and utilize the technology to be competitive. Since very few studies have examined and evaluated how the TV industry manages its business using IDTV (i.e. IDTV commerce), this paper sets out to establish a decision analysis mechanism that can assist the TV operators in adopting and managing IDTV as their commerce platform. Literature review, semi-structured interviews and survey were employed to investigate and identify the key issues for adopting IDTV commerce by TV operators. The AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) methodology was used to the data collected. Our results indicate that the three most important adoption and management drivers for implementing IDTV as a commerce platform are: (1) the operational capability for the IDTV services; (2) the innovation and strategy execution capabilities of the TV operators; and (3) the level of maturity in technological development within the TV industry. In addition, most respondents indicate that the IDTV commerce should be fully operated and managed in-house, rather than outsourced.