Motivations and Barriers to the Adoption of 3G Mobile Multimedia Services: An End User Perspective in the Italian Market

Abstract

This chapter provides an end-user perspective on mobile multimedia services that are likely to emerge with the roll out of Third Generation Mobile Services (3G). More specifically, the objectives of the study are: to provide an insight into current behavior in terms of attitudes towards, access and usage of multimedia mobile services by current end users; to establish main clusters of mobile users; to investigate the possible motivations and barriers of usage of new mobile multimedia services as viewed by current users. The remainder of this chapter is organized into the following four sections. The first section provides a brief review of the literature on the technology acceptance model. Next we present our research model based on a qualitative exploratory survey conducted in six markets. Then we test the proposed model on the Italian market and present the analysis and results of our study. Finally we make conclusions by discussing the implications of our study, followed by presenting future research directions.