Lowering the barriers for online cross-media usage: Scenarios for a Belgian single sign-on solution

The digitization has led to an ecosystem in which an online media portal has become an essential extension of traditional media and users are enabled to consume news and entertainment via different platforms. These evolutions pose some challenges for the media companies in terms of shifting business models, but they also bring them new possibilities in managing their relations with users. An important first step here is to identify the online users and turn anonymous users into registered ones. Today, however, there is a myriad of logins and passwords one needs when surfing the web, which can make the management of these logins a challenge for users. The Belgian media industry seeks to deal with this challenge by introducing a collaborative nation-wide single sign-on (SSO) system across their digital platforms, called Media ID. This paper provides four scenarios describing the potential outcomes in terms of user adoption and hence market potential of the integration of a SSO service into a regional media system. The scenarios are built upon focus group interviews with media users and in-depth interviews with the stakeholders from the involved media companies. They describe to what extent the innovative service can influence user’s online media consumption behaviour but also to what extent the media companies can implement it, two factors that mutually shape each other. In the discussion of the scenarios, requirements to ensure the broad applicability of a SSO service by both media users and media organizations are identified.