Exploring the Adoption of Interactive Digital Television Services as a Retail Shopping Platform

The aim of this research is to consider the possible effect of an emerging technology platform on the uptake of online shopping: interactive (digital) Television (iTV), which enables viewers to select a variety of viewing options, publicity materials, games, entertainment and more recently shopping. An augmented version of the original TAM is applied to this study. Two new constructs are considered namely access and awareness together with perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment and security. The results show that indeed the augmented TAM can be used as a predictive model for the adoption of iTV as an online shopping platform. It is concluded that access, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment and perceived usefulness are significant factors to determine the consumers’ behavioural intentions towards the use of digital TV as a new shopping platform. However, awareness and security are considered to be insignificant with no effect on consumers’ behavioural intentions towards the new shopping medium. Summary In this study an augmented version of the technology acceptance model (TAM) is applied to interactive TV shopping (iTV). By performing this we intend to determine the relevance of TAM as a predictive model for the adoption of iTV as an online shopping platform as well as identity the factors which are likely to affect consumer adoption of iTV.